


Exit Strategy

by iammemyself



Series: Arkhamverse [23]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games), Batman: Arkham - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Jonathan is kinda not conscious so I don't want to put him as a character, Programmer Dad, Riddlerbots - Freeform, there's Scrids as motivation but
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-03-03 15:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13344183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: Edward escapes from the GCPD to find he has nothing left, and nothing left to build from. References several past fics but I’ll try to remember to recap when necessary.





	1. Part the First

Batman: Exit Strategy

By Indiana

 

**Characters: Edward Nygma, Riddlerbots (Alan, Ada), Jonathan Crane (cameo)**

**Synopsis: Edward escapes from the GCPD to find he has nothing left, and nothing left to build from. References several past fics but I’ll try to remember to recap when necessary.**

Part the First

He had been waiting for two weeks.

The police department had had him on some heavy drug that made him exceedingly tired and rendered complex thought nearly impossible.  Once he had come to this realisation he had ceased taking it, but under the guise of doing the opposite, and between that and the withdrawal symptoms he was forced to spend far too much time lying down.  He needed to pretend to be asleep, though the raging headaches he was having made actual sleep difficult.  He kept himself on one side, back facing anyone who might have the inclination to look in on him, kneaded his brow as discreetly as possible, and listened. 

If he waited too long, he would miss his chance.  The GCPD had no place to put him or the other former residents of the Asylum at the moment, so they were all crammed into the precinct for the time being.  As soon as they were able to move them, however, Edward would lose his edge.  That being the fact his mech was, as the information went, being stored in some sort of evidence museum without any safeguards whatsoever.  He needed to get to it.  If it were truly unguarded, as he’d been told, he could use it to escape the GCPD and return home without any obstacles whatsoever. 

Home.

That thought always gave him pause.  He had been without a home for a good twenty years: he’d lived in a condominium once, but upon embarking on his career as the Riddler he had traded that for being shuffled from police station to Asylum to Blackgate and back again in some sort of absurd cycle that could not be broken.  And the factory… if it remained unknown, it was all he had left.  There was nothing there to really _classify_ it as a home, and yet he kept thinking of it that way regardless.

The deciding factor he always arrived on was his children.

They were there.  They were _waiting_ for him.  Actually, literally, honest-to-God _waiting_.  For _him_.  He scarcely thought such a thing had happened in his entire life.  He _needed_ to get back to them, to reward their patience and their loyalty.  And… and he had to ensure that they knew he loved them, even if… showing it was something he didn’t do very often. 

He would tell them the whole story one day, and they would listen and they would understand.  It wasn’t his fault.  He had not been prepared for fatherhood, not in the slightest.  But he’d done his best, and he believed that they knew that.  Could he have done better?  Perhaps.  It was hard to be better at something you did not know how to do and had no means of deeper discovery.  And he didn’t.  He didn’t know how to be a father, not in the slightest.  And it had taken far, far too long for him to understand he should have given this mess up a long, long time ago, but he knew now.  It had been fun.  He had achieved things so-called better men would never be able to aspire to, let alone accomplish themselves.  But the time had come to let it go.  He could not let it start over again, could not allow it to _consume_ him again.  And he knew with absolute certainty that would be the outcome if he did not get out of here and he did not, finally, _leave_ this accursed city, because he had done it all before and entrenched himself deeper and deeper each time.  In an odd twist, the mind-muddying medication had lent him a unique clarity.  It had prevented him from complex thought, had kept from him the determination he’d had in the holding cell to start over again and _prove_ , once and for all, what he was and what the Detective could never be, could never hold _back_ , and without that odd… madness, was the only word he could put to it, without that he could think in a way he had lost the ability to do when he had started all of this.  He still wanted to start over again.  Still wanted to demonstrate to them all that they _hadn’t_ beaten him, that they never, ever could! but it was time to move on.  He had _responsibilities_ now.  He had kids.  At home.  Waiting for him.

It was the small things he missed the most.  Alan’s never-ending questions, Ada’s weight against his leg, listening to them talk while he did something else.  They had been with him a scarce eight months and he already could not contemplate a future without them.  The same could not be said about most of the other people he knew.  Except for…

He opened his eyes to see the vague and blurry wall in front of him.  Jonathan was here someplace as well.  He couldn’t imagine the GCPD had cared overmuch for what happened to him; if Jonathan was even still alive, he was doubtless very ill and with even less ability to take care of himself than usual.  He probably was not going to be able to walk out of here.  And Edward knew he did not quite have the strength to help him, not yet; he needed to get himself to safety first, take a few days to recover, and then come back and retrieve Jonathan.  But to do all of that he needed to get going in the first place.

He sat up, wincing at the protestation of his largely unused body.  If the mech was not there, as Selina had promised, he was unsure if he could even make it back to the factory like this.  He’d hardly slept or eaten in months, and being forced to lie motionless for days on end had done nothing for his musculature except allow it to degrade.  But it was all only going to get worse if he waited much longer.  He picked up the cheap glasses from the place on the floor he had had to keep them and stood up slowly, walking to the door of the cell and squinting out into the hallway.  It seemed the way was clear, and the time was right, though even if it wasn’t he was pushing the delay to an uncomfortable length.  He was not at his best, but he could think passably, and that was good enough for now. 

He pulled the arms off the glasses and the curved pieces off the ends of those and slipped his hands through the bars, manoeuvering the bare metal into the lock.  It took him a little longer than usual, given his loss of dexterity and aggravatingly present brain fog, but it soon clicked and he pulled the door open one inch in case of an alarm.

None sounded.  He frowned, wondering if he should be grateful the GCPD had no budget or insulted they had not felt the need to watch him more closely.  No matter.  He didn’t need difficulties at this time, as flattering as they would be.

Throughout his career as the Riddler, Edward had always found it quite ridiculous how few bodies these places had on the floor to ensure their prisoners stayed put.  The night shift was beyond undesirable, and the level of care in these places had always been greatly below par.  But seriously?  Was he actually just _walking_ down the hallway just now, with _no_ officers to be found?  Had they drugged _everyone_ so severely they could not imagine moving, let alone escaping?  The corner of his mouth tightened in derision.

The door to the evidence room was locked, and his makeshift lockpick broke inside of it.  He dropped the pieces to the floor in distaste.  What now?  He _had_ to get in there, because even in a police station this negligent walking out the front door was not an option. 

Well.  There was a vent.  He looked down at it in distaste. 

 _If_ he _can do it, so can you._

So after waiting a minute or so to ensure no one was coming down the hallway, Edward knelt down and pulled the grate off the wall with a lot less effort than he’d anticipated.  It seemed that the Bat had already ripped this away himself, and stripped the bolts doing so, and the person who had ‘fixed’ it had merely shoved it back into place and gone on their way.  Their mistake, he supposed.  He set it aside and resigned himself to the fact they probably had not had their ducts cleaned in the last fifty years.

He wasn’t claustrophobic in the slightest – his assorted properties had had their fair share of tight squeezes – but the difficulty he had in pulling himself up to the horizontal despite the fact he could stand inside the first ten feet of the duct made him wish enormously that he’d just been able to unlock the door.  He had to pull up the collar of his t-shirt around his nose to avoid breathing in all the dust, and it just made the whole situation far more ridiculous than it really needed to be.

The trip ended sooner than later, thankfully, and the grate on the other side was not refastened particularly strenuously either.  He somehow climbed out of it without falling on his face and spent a minute or so covering his nose and mouth with one hand and trying not to cough.  Despite this he still had the sudden, intense need for a cigarette.  It had been several weeks and you’d _think_ that would be enough time that –

Oh, that needed to wait.  He had to get out of here before someone realised he was missing.  He brushed the dust and cobwebs off of the jumpsuit and sneezed once or twice.  Then he cast his eyes about to look for his mech, but he didn’t have to search very hard.  Once he saw it he had to just stand there and stare for a second, because it didn’t make any sense at all.

It really was just sitting there. 

In the open.  No security tape.  No laser system, no alarm wire.  He could tell on sight they hadn’t so much as disabled it.  They had just walked his mech right up there and left it.  Right there.  As a laughingstock monument to his failure.  His eyes strayed to the button indicating an audio description of the things they had taken from him.  A cursory look around told him they had installed these for everything they had stolen and put up here on display.  He bit his tongue until the rage burning in his chest subsided a little.  He wanted to know what they had said.  He _needed_ to know. 

 _No, Eddie, you_ need _to get home._

It would only take a minute.

_Every minute you stand here is a minute someone might wander by and find you here.  And you are in no state for a standoff with the police right now._

That was true.  But –

_Quit your waffling and go!_

He thinned his lips and climbed into the mech, glancing behind him at his other belongings mounted to the wall inside of a glass case.  The hat he had no use for, but the cane he wanted back.  He’d be taking that.

He firmed his hands around the controls but did not start up the machine.  He had to leave, yes.  He couldn’t keep sticking around here, no matter how infuriated he was to know that they were treating him as some sort of amusing sideshow act they could put on display and ridicule for the delight of the masses.  He could not let them get away with that, could he?  He simply _couldn’t._ He set his jaw and tried to think.  His brain was still mired down from that damned medication, but something was coming to him.  He simply needed another moment.

Then he looked up and around the room again and realised what he was going to do.  If the true owners could not have their belongings, then the GCPD would not have them either.  He would destroy them and it would serve those pompous ignoramuses right, to think they could just put his mech out here in the open as though it were theirs to do as they liked with.  He turned the mech on and directed the laser at one side of the room before activating it, sweeping the beam through all of the trophy cases and then bringing it back to burn through the wall in front of him.  There had never been any greater indication of the disgusting state of this city than the act of stealing from people and making a museum out of them.  Honestly.  If Edward had done anything of the sort he would have been imprisoned and ridiculed in a second, but the _police_ , of course, _the police_ were allowed to do whatever they wanted…

He fumed over that until he got to the Orphanage, at which time he jumped out of the mech to activate the switch that led down into the tunnels from outside.  He’d leave the mech there inside the tunnel and make the rest of the trip on foot.  If he had to infiltrate his own factory, the mech would be more a hindrance than a help.

The entrance was hidden beneath the puzzle structure he’d built out front of the Orphanage, and laid itself on its side to reveal the hole just big enough for the mech to fit into.  Once he’d brought it down into the tunnel he dismounted and ran.

The tunnel would take him twenty minutes to walk usually, which translated to roughly ten minutes or so of running.  At least, it would have if he had been in better health.  Months of poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and smoking more than usual had put a strain on his body.  He only managed a little under five minutes before he had to stop, stumbling into a crouch against the tunnel wall with a terrible ache in his chest and a cough that robbed his lungs of the remaining capacity they had left.  When his breath came to him again he saw his hands were shaking.  Damn.  He considered just walking the rest of the way, but remembered why he’d been running in the first place.  He’d been away from them too long.  He needed to know if they were all right.  He _had_ to know!

He took a deep breath and kept running.  By the time he’d come to the end of the tunnel he was dizzy, and more than a little nauseous, but he had to put that aside for now.  Once he’d found them he could get things back the way they should be, including himself.  He yanked open the door to the factory and was met with a pile of rubble that spilled over his shoes.  His throat went dry.

 _Tabarnac._   He had _forgotten_ about that!

He stepped through it with as much caution as he could, since it consisted both of concrete and of rather dangerous metal pieces, to find that it was all gone.  All of it.  The explosion had been contained underground by his design, in case he’d needed to demolish it all in a hurry but still use the space later, so everything above this was intact.  But the factory he had poured six months of work into was gone.  All that was left of it now was tonnes of melted and torn metal, splintered wood, and the bits and pieces of the bots he’d left to defend the place in his absence.  It put some other kind of ache into his chest, but he had to ignore that now too.  This was gone.  He had to put it behind him.  There were more important things just now.

_But when am I going to stop and let it all catch up with me?_

It was a good question.  He’d been putting it off for… years, now.  He was going to have to confront all of it eventually, and he’d be fortunate if the weight of it didn’t crush him.  He _definitely_ did not need that at the moment.

Since the elevator was now defunct, Edward was going to have to figure out some way of _climbing_ up into the store above.  Some of the chainlink had become detached from the ceiling so he could climb up the wall with that, but it was not going to be a whole lot of fun.  Especially now that he didn’t have any gloves. 

Well, it was the only option right now.  He wiped his hands off on his pants and set to climbing. 

He’d only been in prison a fortnight but he felt so _weak._ His arms burned just halfway up the wall, and while that was happening he so vividly remembered the months it had taken him to gain the muscle needed to construct on the scale he had.  When he got to the top of the wall he had to kneel there for a minute to gather his strength.  He was so tired.  He wanted to go home, but he had no home to go to.  It was gone.  Everything he had was gone.  He coughed a little.  Time to keep going.

He made his way through the rest of the toy store, which was in much the same condition he’d left it.  There were some spots of blood and discarded equipment on the floor, signs of Selina’s passing, but it didn’t really matter.  He was getting out of here for good.  It was time to retire.

Back on the upper floor, at store level, was more of the same.  He hadn’t put any equipment nor signs of his presence up here, as a precaution to keep this place an absolute secret, and everything was as it had been, only dustier.  Except… no, someone _had_ been there, in the front of the store.  There were two suitcases on the floor against a jutting of wall into the centre of the room.   _Calisse_.

_Dad?_

He turned around, apprehension adding to the unpleasant mix in his gut.  “Ada?”  It couldn’t be.  He couldn’t _dare_ hope that –

 _Dad!  You’re back!_  

And Ada came running up to him, and when he bent to catch her she latched around his chest far too tightly.  Picking her up certainly didn’t help him any, but he had to.  This was it.  This was worth everything, somehow, this hug from his little girl he had never meant to leave for so long.  “Oh, my princess,” he murmured to her, “I’ve missed you.”

 _I missed you too!  Alan said you were going to be gone_ one day _!_

“I… meant to be,” Edward hedged, and she was quite capable of clinging to him without support but his back was beginning to pain him.  She was moderately heavy and his arms were already tired.  It took a moment to pry her from him so he could rest them.  “Where _is_ Alan?”

 _I’m here_ , Alan said, but oddly he didn’t seem to want a hug.  Edward would have quite gladly given him one, and considered doing it anyway… but if Alan did not want to instigate it perhaps Edward should leave him for now.  Edward put a hand on his shoulder instead.

“I’m glad you’re all right, son.  And Nikola?” 

 _He wandered off someplace_ , Alan said.  _He’ll turn up sometime._

Edward was not entirely pleased about that – Nikola was seven feet tall, and difficult to conceal – but if Nikola _really_ wanted to disappear Alan was unable to stop him.   He suddenly felt very fatigued again and sat down on the floor against the wall, rubbing his eyes.  He was already getting a headache from having lost his glasses.

 _Are you all right?_ Alan asked, and when he opened his eyes again he saw that Alan was crouched in front of him.  He nodded.

“I’m just tired.  I’m going to sleep for a while and then… and then I’ll figure out what to do next.”  Hopefully.  God, he was tired.  And he felt sick.  Very, very sick.  If he didn’t go to sleep he might actually vomit, and he’d have a hell of a time explaining _that_ to Alan.  He lay down and put his glasses aside, having the passing thought that his raised body temperature from all the exertion was going to fade soon enough and he was going to freeze in this unheated room on this November night, but he didn’t have the energy to untie the sleeves of the jumpsuit and put them back on. 

 _Ada, come sit with Dad for a bit_ , he heard Alan say quietly, and Ada came and started tousling his hair.  That made him feel better.  Not physically – physically he was still a wreck – but hell.  They were safe, and he’d be all right eventually, and all he had to do now was rescue Jonathan and get them all out of here.  He could do it.  He could do anything.  He could.

 

//

 

**Author’s Note**

**This first one is a little on the short side, I apologise.  This fic I have been holding onto for a year or so now so if you spot inconsistencies in future PLEASE point them out because a lot of stuff I had to change around from how I wrote some parts of this originally and I might accidentally include old details that don’t belong.**

**‘Indy, why is the GCPD so empty that he can just stroll around wherever he wants?’ well this is after Arkham Knight so the city is probably broke and the police are probably all over the city fixing shit, the ones that were allowed to come back to the force after they ditched especially.  They probably don’t have the manpower to watch the precinct too closely, and besides that in the games Batman is always strolling around and never running into anyone.**


	2. Part the Second

Part the Second

 

 

He knew when he opened his eyes that he had slept many, many hours, but it didn’t feel like enough.  He was still exhausted, and his body seemed to have become deadweight.  He hadn’t eaten in almost three days and his stomach hurt like hell.  He also had a headache that hedged the border of a migraine.  All in all he just wanted to sleep again.  He couldn’t, however.  He had too many things to take care of.

He found it in him to sit up and when he did so he realised there was a reason he wasn’t shivering from cold: his children had built a heating element for him.  It made him feel better, and he smiled a little.  He reached out towards it, but as soon as he did so Alan’s hand grasped his forearm and halted him.  He looked up.

 _Dad, no_ , Ada said, Alan shaking his head in a silent echo and releasing him.

“I only wanted –“ Edward began, extending his arm again, but Alan wouldn’t let him and Ada leaned forward in distress.

 _Dad,_ no!

“Fine,” Edward said.  “Fine.  I’ll appreciate it from here.  Thank you.”

He pulled his legs together and put his elbows on his knees, hunching over to rub extensively at his eyes.  He felt extremely dazed and _still_ a little dizzy, as though he’d been half asleep for his entire life, and very numb all over.  More than that, however, he had the sudden need to relieve himself.  That meant making the trip to the abandoned fairgrounds about five minutes’ walk from his current position.  That was fine.  He needed a little time to let his head clear out anyway. 

He stood up slowly as he could, but it was still so very painful that he almost didn’t make it.  His muscles were sore and straining, and he sucked in a breath between his teeth to aid as distraction.  “Alan, my boy, I need you to do something for me,” he said once he’d more or less stood.  “I need food and water.  I don’t really care what.  Something I can heat up would be appreciated.  I’ll be right back.”

Alan nodded and headed out, and Edward looked around for his cane.  He needed to bring it just in case.  Ada ran up, holding it out, and he took it as he thanked her.  As he started to leave, however, she followed him, and he rolled his eyes.  She always did this. 

“Princess.  You don’t have to come with me.  I have something personal to do, that’s all.  You can stay here or go with your brother.”

She wrapped both hands around his arm firmly and looked up at him.  He gave up.  He didn’t really have the time to argue with her about it right now.

“Fine.  Fine.  I don’t know why you keep insisting on this but fine.” 

The sun was going down and everything was suffused in an indigo gloom that didn’t help his head any.  He kept a wary eye out as he walked through the dust, but there was no one around.  Afraid of the Bat, probably.  Edward had not been of the mind to really gather any information during his time at the GCPD, but what he _had_ heard had been… concerning.

When they arrived at the fairgrounds Edward attended to his business while Ada unearthed his soap from where it was hidden underneath a floorboard and put it on the edge of the one sink he kept clean for himself.  The water there was a vaguely orange colour and it was always cold, but at least there was water at all.  He lathered up his hands and thought on what he needed to do next.  He still wasn’t feeling motivated to actually do it – he really just wanted to go on vacation for about three months – but the thinking was a step in the right direction. 

_He’s coming for you.  You know he is._

Edward took a breath and realised his hands were starting to itch.  Dammit.

“He isn’t,” he said to himself, in a low voice.  “He has other things to worry about.”

_He knows you’ll be back for Jonathan.  He knows you’re going back.  He’s going to kill you both if you don’t do it._

“I’m not doing it,” Edward said, even as his breath started to catch and his hands to shake. 

_You’re going to die and Jonathan with you.  Do you want to be responsible for that?  Do you really?  It’s your fault.  It’s your fault he’s there already.  You could have stopped all of this and you didn’t.  It was so easy and you didn’t do it._

He was pressing his forehead into the mirror and he was rubbing his fingers over those of his opposite hand and he hadn’t even realised he was doing it.  No no no he did _not_ need to do this, not right now…

_Yes.  It’s fine.  Everything will be fine.  You’re doing the right thing.  This will help._

“It doesn’t,” Edward whispered.  “It’s stupid.  It doesn’t change anything.”

_Once more and everything will be fine.  You’ll get to Jonathan in time, the Bat won’t find either of you, and you’ll escape.  This is the only way to ensure that.  It’s the only way.  You have to._

“I don’t want to,” Edward said hopelessly, and he pressed one wet fist to the mirror above his head, the water falling back along his arm.  “That doesn’t make any sense!  It’s _wrong_ , it’s just _wrong_ , and I don’t want to do it!”

_Yes you do.  You know it’s the only way.  You’re going to fail if you don’t do it.  You have to do it again.  Did you hear that?  He’s here.  He’s coming.  You can hold him off if you –_

His chest went tight and, breath stalled, he looked behind him, eyes wide and mouth ajar.  No one was there, of course.  No one was there, and this whole line of thought was stupid, but it was so _soothing_.  He would feel better if he just did it. 

No, he wouldn’t.  He’d feel the need to go up to five, and then maybe seven, and then he’d be here all night as though washing his hands until they bled was going to fix anything.  It wasn’t.  He knew that.  He knew how irrational it was, and he hated it.  Hated knowing how useless it was and being unable to stop himself regardless.

“Princess,” he managed.  She appeared on his left, touching the elbow on the arm that was still hanging into the sink.

“I need a marker.  Now, please.  I don’t care where you get it from, just find me a marker.”

She nodded quickly and ran off, and he pressed his head into the mirror again and tried to breathe.  It was hard.  It was just as hard as it was to keep the one hand against the mirror, because if he moved it he was going to wash his hands a third time and it wasn’t going to help, he knew it wasn’t going to help because this was all much bigger than three repetitions and he was going to have to get to some ungodly number to even begin to find relief.  He would be there until his hands were raw and the yellow porcelain was stained red, and nothing would have changed except he would have inspired an as-yet unseen volume of self-hatred for his weakness.  These compulsions were some sort of cruel joke from the universe: he was so very brilliant, so very skilled, and yet his mind turned back on itself and forced him to engage in these stupid rituals that had _no preventative effect whatsoever…_

Ada returned, holding out a fine point Sharpie in red, and he took it in his shaking hand and pressed it into the top left corner of the mirror.  This was just as stupid, but it wasn’t destructive.  It was a better option, insomuch as his choices were better or worse than each other.

He wrote mindlessly, because he knew all the numbers off by heart as though they were printed on the glossy surface already, and when he had covered most of it his breath came much more easily and his free hand was steady where it gripped the countertop.  His pulse had nearly settled as well, and by the time he had no more space he was all right.  He was ashamed of himself, and he had a passing urge to break the mirror and stab himself with some large resulting shard for being such an idiot, but he was all right.

He took a long, audible breath and released it slowly as he capped the marker.  Hopefully he wouldn't have to do this again for a while.  He didn't have the luxury of writing on things and washing his hands excessively and the like right now. 

Ada pulled on the corner of his shirtsleeve, at the elbow, and he looked down at her.  "What is it?" he asked.

She wrapped herself around his legs and now he truly did feel relief.  He also felt a little less barren on the inside.  He had _something_ left, after all.  He'd been knocked into the dirt and had his life stolen from him while he was down there, but he still had what was important.  He picked her up with a grunt - well, she _was_ quite heavy - and she pressed her face into the struggling hairs on his cheek and clutched his shoulders. 

When his arms started to seize he let her down and turned back to the sink, giving her the marker and soap to put into hiding, and while she did that he opened the tap again and rubbed his face with cold water.  Any remaining tension passed.  He was fine.  He was okay.  He was going to pretend that whole thing never happened.  He was fine.  He wasn't crazy.  He was in control, of everything.

"All right, my princess," he said, shutting off the water.  "Let's go."

She offered him his cane and he waved it off, saying, "Why don't you hang onto it."

She quivered in excitement and nodded several times, clutching it to her body.  He smiled and held out his hand for her to take.  She did so and they started the walk back. 

When they returned, Alan had found Edward several bottles of water and had even had the initiative to set a can of ready to eat soup on the heating element.  Oh, he was proud of that boy.  He gripped Alan's shoulder as he sat, and Alan handed him a pair of disposable utensils still sealed in the package.  "Good work," Edward said, not even caring where he'd gotten these things from at this point.  He was starving and if all Alan had found was a forked stick that he had shaved the bark from he would have used that without complaint.  He was technically homeless at this point, and though he did his best to keep civilised it was not always possible.

Alan nodded in satisfaction but continued maintaining that odd distance.  He’d ask about that if Alan didn’t offer up a reason soon.  It had been going on for too long to have no motivation behind it.

As he ate, Edward considered what he needed to do now.  Rescue Jonathan, certainly, but he couldn't be brought back here.  The few days Edward had been there were already a risk; hiding above his defunct factory was not really _hiding_ by any stretch.  He was going to be caught if he didn't change locations.  They needed someplace else to go. 

He drank deeply from one of the water bottles, not paying attention, and was a little alarmed when he realised he had drained it entirely.  He was in a worse way than he'd thought and that was no good right now.  Jonathan was going to need a lot of care and Edward had to be on form if he was going to get them across the border.  And he was.  He was going to get them across. 

He opened a second bottle and took his time with about half of it.  Then he said, "Alan, I have another job for you.  Interested?"

 _Yes_ , Alan said firmly, straightening.  Edward nodded once.

"We can't stay here much longer.  It's not safe.  I need you to find me someplace we can keep five people and not be found by mistake.  As close to the edge of the city as possible.  On your way back I need you to bring a blanket, as high a quality you can get safely.  In a little while we're going to retrieve Jonathan.  He hasn't escaped himself, so it is likely he is very ill and in need of our help.  I'm fine with your heating element, which was excellent initiative by the way, but he needs a blanket.  Ada and I will ensure the mech is in working order.  We're going to need it to get him back here."

Ada and Alan exchanged a look, or perhaps even an actual sentiment via a frequency out of his range of hearing - they had that ability, though he hoped they trusted him enough not to use it - and then Alan said _, We took some of the wires off it to build the heating element_. 

 _We thought you were done with it_ , Ada said, and she was looking at the floor and clutching the cane into her lap.  _Sorry, Dad_.

 _It was so cold and we wanted to help_ -

"It's fine," he reassured them.  "I'm not upset.  That's easy to fix."  It would actually be difficult, given that he did not have anything to repair it _with_ , but he should still have a car around somewhere he could use.

They were always so troubled when they thought they had disappointed him.  They never had, and he doubted they ever would, but they worried about it anyway.

 _Do you need me to find wire too?_ Alan asked.  Edward shook his head.

"I'll take something else apart.  Thank you."

Alan stood to leave, and Edward called after him, "Alan.  One other thing, please.  I need a razor.  Disposable is fine this time.  Don't worry about that.  But I need one."

 _All right_ , Alan said, and off he went.

Edward drank the rest of the second bottle of water and stood, trying to unravel the kinks in his back.  He was in a lot of pain.  He'd rarely been in so much in his entire life.  His head was very manageable at least; the ache was deep and annoying, but dull.  "Come on, princess," he said, waving to her.  "Come help me."

She never refused such requests and scrambled after him, still hanging onto the cane.  He wasn't going to be able to keep it much longer anyway so there was no harm in letting her. 

She of course was not very helpful as far as the mech went, more interested in hanging off his pants forcefully enough that she just about pulled them off several times, but she apparently got bored of that because she started walking merrily away.  He looked after her, trying to gauge where she could possibly be going, but he hadn't a clue.  "Princess!" he called after her, using the term of endearment because sometimes she misinterpreted a raised voice as yelling, "Where are you going?"

 _Over there!_ she said, pointing in a vague westerly direction, which really told him nothing.  He hesitated.  He didn't like telling them no, but it was just too dangerous out there now.

"If I can't see you, you're too far," was his usual compromise, and she nodded and continued on.  She had the cane at least if there was an issue, though he had doubts she would actually know how to use it.  But he could fix the mech himself and let her play before he had to put her to work again.  He wished he could have sent Alan with her, not only to watch her but so he could have a break as well.  When he had built them he had never imagined this kind of situation.  He was incredibly lucky to have them. 

He called Ada back after about an hour of accomplishing very little, considering they had removed more parts than he had anticipated and he saw no way of replacing them at the moment.  She ran right up, which he was thankful for.  They listened to him and he was fortunate.  He could have ended up with three difficult rebels.  He frowned to himself as he came to the realisation Nikola still had not turned up.  Just _where_ had he wandered off to?

He sat down on the floor and picked up the soup can, stirring the remaining contents before eating.  He had wanted to inhale the whole thing earlier but he had resisted, knowing doing that after three days of nothing would just have made him sluggish.  He drank a little from a fresh water bottle, not liking that he was on the third one already but he needed to rehydrate.  He had to be sharp.  Everything rested on him.

 _Dad!_ Ada exclaimed, holding out her hands.  _I made you this_.

It was a flower crown, made of bunches of clover with little purple flowers wound in for contrast, he supposed.  It would only last about an hour, given that it was made of weeds, but it wasn't as though there were an abundance of green flowers to choose from.

“Thank you,” Edward said, reaching out for it.  “It’s beautiful.”  In reality it was more all-right-looking, but hey, a present was a present.

 _No!_ she said, snatching it back.  _I’m putting it on.  So it will be perfect._

“Of course.”  He declined his head to make it easier and as she fussed with his hair he was a little ashamed to realise it must have been disgusting.  He hadn’t so much as combed it in days.  Now his skin was starting to crawl because _that_ meant he needed a shower.  He hated that the list of tasks he needed to complete just kept expanding.  If Selina hadn’t blown his factory to hell he wouldn’t have to _worry_ about any of that!

 _There_ , she said in satisfaction, sitting down next to him.  _You look very beautiful_.

“It’s just what I needed,” he told her, and she hung off his arm while he finished the cold soup.

Alan returned a few minutes later, and he had what looked to be a very suitable blanket rolled under one arm.  He set it down against the wall and handed Edward a plastic package, which contained a green razor.  Edward smiled and put it behind him.  He always went above and beyond expectations.

 _Did you make me a flower crown?_ Alan asked Ada, and she shook her head.

_It was just for Dad!_

_You never make me one!  You said you would next time!_

_Well, I decided not to!  It was just for Dad!_   And she proceeded to start applying herself to his waist, but he pushed her off.

“No.  You’re not putting me in the middle of this, Ada.  That’s not how it works.  If you’re arguing with him, keep me out of it.  Alan, you can’t demand that someone give you something you’re not owed.  You can ask nicely, but if she says no you need to respect her decision.”  He sighed and rubbed at his face.  The hair was beginning to irritate him, now that he knew it was there.  “Look.  I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this.  Don’t fight.  _Talk_ to each other.” 

 _You’re right, Dad_ , Alan said after a moment.  _I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking._

 _And maybe I should make him one one time,_ Ada mumbled, looking emphatically in the other direction.

Wow.  He couldn’t believe it had all been resolved that fast.  His parenting was on form today, it seemed.  “Uh… Alan, I don’t suppose you’ve been keeping an eye on my messages for me?”

 _Of course I have,_ Alan said, and he went around to one of the suitcases and removed Edward’s phone from the top pocket.  _There are a lot of people trying to speak with you.  Something about a bat-man and fear toxin?_

Oh, _calisse_.  If the rumours were true…

He took the handset and unlocked it, giving the messages a quick scrolling through.  Most of them were from informants who wanted out, and immediately.  And at the moment he had no real way of knowing which of them were still in the field, and which had been… forcibly removed already.  He took a long breath through his nose and put the phone down.

 _What does it all mean_? Alan asked, settling down in front of him, though at that odd distance.  Edward slid his fingers under his glasses and rubbed at his left eye.

“The project I was working on… it was, in short, a plan to kill the Bat.  His self-professed purpose in life is to clean up the streets of this city of all those he deems to be acting unlawfully upon it.  The plan succeeded, and yet he somehow escaped defeat, as often he does.”  He scratched at the inside of one of his ears.  “Usually he’s content to beat us half to death and send us back to prison, but… something changed.”

_He’s using the fear toxin as a weapon now._

Edward nodded.

 _And what does that do_?

“It makes a man bear witness to what he fears most,” Edward answered.  “And when in the throes of that sort of unique terror, extremes happen.  By which I mean people die, or they live long enough to wish they had.”

 _I’m not scared of nothin’_ , Ada announced, kneeling down beside Alan with a clatter, and despite himself Edward smiled.  But Alan said, soberly,

_Jonathan’s project is a chemical that makes you so afraid you die, or wish you were dead?_

“Fundamentally.”

_But the bat-man didn’t die._

Edward shook his head.  “What _did_ happen to him is unclear.  All we know now is that he has taken the toxin for his own use, and though he was brutal before this is a level as yet unseen of him.  People are dying, and still he is using it anyway.  This has never happened before.”

 _What are you going to do_?

“We’re leaving,” Edward said, meeting his eyes so he would know he meant it.  “This game has changed into a facsimile with no rules, and those that don’t leave won’t survive.  It won’t take him long to discover I’ve escaped from prison.  I can evade capture for a while, but the real trouble will be liberating Jonathan from the GCPD and hiding long enough that he can travel.”

 “I hope it can wait,” came a voice he knew all too well from the doorway, “because I have a plan of my own that needs a little oomph from you.”

“Selina,” Edward said guardedly.  Alan leaned around to face her, sitting very still.  She was as beautiful as ever, dressed all in accentuating black and her hair tousled carefully over her forehead.  He was suddenly acutely aware that he did not at all look his best at the moment.  She always caught him like this.

She looked at him a little sideways.  “No need to be like that, Eddie.  We’re square, aren’t we?  You took advantage of my good graces and tricked me into my own kidnapping.  I paid my own ransom with your money and sent your factory to the ground you built it on.  Even steven, right?”

“I needed that money,” Edward said gruffly, solely to save face.  She was right, of course.  She often was.   “I have a great deal of things I need to do with it.”

“It’s your lucky day, then,” she told him, walking smoothly across the room until she was in front of him.  “You can have it back.  For one small favour.”

“A small favour, eh?”  It was going to be something onerously complicated.

“I need a new identity.  You have a way of getting me one.  You can have the money back in return.”

Edward sighed and pushed Ada out of his lap.  “You do know I’m already in the middle of such a thing for somebody else.”

She frowned a little.  Even though she was annoyed with him it _still_ looked good on her.  “Who?”

He looked away, unsure if he wanted to tell her about Jonathan just now.  “A friend of mine.”

“And here I thought _I_ was your only friend, Eddie.”  She was teasing but he couldn’t bring himself to mind.  He smiled at her.

“I have one or two on the side.  For when you aren’t around, of course.”  He had to sober himself for this next part.  “We are truly settled, then?  This will not come back to bite me later?”

She shook her head.  “It’s not the time for that, Eddie.  Besides, what I did here was your own fault.  Don’t pretend you didn’t deserve it for betraying me.”

He nodded, a grimace tugging at the corner of his lips.  He hated to admit it.  But she had done him a favour, and he had turned it back on her.  He had been jealous and resentful. 

“I suppose you and _him_ are…”  He wasn’t even sure how to finish that sentence.  There was no way to keep from sounding like a hopeless fool, especially considering he had a boyfriend of his own already. 

Oh, but some feelings were too pervasive to let go of. 

“We never really were in the first place.”  She had him pinned with those eyes of hers, now.  “You’re not going to say ‘I told you so’, now are you?”

“I suppose that would be impolite.”

“But you did.”

“I did.”

She sat down beside him, back against the wall, and he couldn’t deny that thrilled him.  She smelled nice.  She always did.  He always used to.  He needed to get back to that.

“You seem to have snapped out of it,” she remarked, regarding her perfect fingernails with nonchalance.  “What did it?”

“Snapped out of what.”  He probably could have guessed if he hadn’t been so distracted.

“You know.”  She poked his arm.  “You were a little over the top, even for you.”

“It didn’t quite end the way we had planned.”

She laughed.  “Be honest.  Has it ever?”

He found himself sighing a little.  “I suppose it hasn’t.”

“Listen.  Eddie.  I didn’t come here only to ask you for those papers.  I had another idea in mind.”  She poked his arm again.  “You know sticking around here any longer is a bad idea, right?”

“Yes.”

She drew her legs up so that her knees were bent, and from that angle it was very difficult not to admire the smooth curve of her calves.  “So you already have a plan.”

“I do.”

“Room for one more?”

He imagined it, for a moment, going to Canada with Selina at his side.  It would be a lot of fun, he had to admit that. 

But he’d made a promise, a long time ago when such things still carried significant weight to him, and he couldn’t break it now that she had come along.  He had always had fun with her, that was true.  But that was all they’d ever done.  Nothing serious, or long-term.  Lighthearted shenanigans were all well and good, it was just… not a good idea to break a promise for someone he didn’t even really know would stick around when the shimmer faded. 

She was smart.  She was crafty.  But she could disappear with so little as a mistaken nudge from him.  She didn’t need him and she never would.  He would never be sure there would not come another day when he woke up and she had gone, off to find the next thrill in her life once he ceased to be it. 

He wanted to tell her there _was_ room for one more anyway, even knowing all of this.  But he wasn’t going to.  He was going to stick to the plan he already had.  “I’m afraid there isn’t, my dear.”

Her lips formed a thin line and she looked away from him.  “Figures.”  She ran a hand through her hair absently.  “I’m too late, huh?”

About twenty years too late.  “A little.”

“She can’t be prettier than me.”

He laughed.  “He definitely has nothing on you, my dear.  He is nothing to look at, whilst you… you are an unparalleled master stroke of nature’s brush.”

She threw back her head and laughed, and it was a beautiful sound.  He had honestly missed it.  All of it.  “Do you always have to be like this?” she asked, but she was smiling.

“I have a great deal of like sentiments I haven’t used yet.  It would be a shame to let them go to waste.”

“I bet it would.”  She leaned forward and stood up, and he couldn’t deny he was a little disappointed she was leaving already.  But if she wasn’t coming with him, she had no need to stay any longer.  “Your boyfriend isn’t the jealous type, is he?”

“It would be difficult for him to be jealous over something he doesn’t know about.”

“Our secret.”  And she bent down and kissed him on the tip of his nose, and he suddenly remembered lying sleepily in a warm bed with her, carefree and content.  She used to do that every morning before she left.  Every morning, he would feel the caress of her soft lips against his nose and she would whisper, “See you soon.”

She’d even said it the day she didn’t come back.  He’d understood, a little, midway through that week when he saw who she was with.  Unfortunately that didn’t dull the pain.

She had said it just now, too, but he hadn’t been listening.  When she waved at him he held up a hand in farewell, watching her go with some regret.  Maybe he should have said yes.  Taken her with him. 

But he couldn’t trust her to stay.

 

 

 

**Author’s note**

**In case someone is like ‘Indy?  Why are they so friendly?’ well, in Arkham Knight there’s them audio files about him tricking her into kidnapping herself, and I mean she didn’t need THAT much convincing to help him.  And maybe she just felt sorry for him but most people who feel sorry for Riddler would rather sock him in the face than do him a favour.  Also I like that ship so in my canon he had a thing with her sometime before Arkham Origins.**

**Ada is quiet during this because when I originally wrote it it was all the way back when I wrote the original fic about Ada, where she didn’t talk at all, and I didn’t see too much purpose in adding dialogue for her.**


	3. Part the Third

Part the Third

 

 

He looked around, scratching at his browline as he did so; it was itchy in a vague sort of way.  "I'll be right back, all right you two?  I need to shave.  This beard is starting to make my entire face itch."

 _I'm coming!_ Ada said, and she jumped up enthusiastically. 

"Sweetheart, I can -"

But she was already hanging off his leg, cane still clutched in her hand, and not only that but apparently Alan wanted to tag along as well.  Edward wondered if organic children were just as likely to follow their parents everywhere possible and said aloud, "Ada, let your brother have the cane for a while, then."

 _I like to carry it,_ Ada said, pressing it into herself.  Edward rolled his eyes.

"Yes, and so does he.  Give him the cane, please."

_I don't want to._

"You are being _very_ difficult today."  He held out his hand for it and she reluctantly gave it to him.  He passed it to Alan, who accepted it eagerly. 

 _Thank you_ , Alan said, and Ada made a noise of upset but Edward only peeled her off his leg and gave her his hand. 

"You can't always have your way.  Let's go."

 _I like to though_ , Ada protested, as Alan seemingly decided he was leading them there and struck out ahead. 

"That doesn't make a difference.  Sometimes someone else gets their way instead."

_When's it my turn to?_

"You just _had_ your turn."  God, this was so stupid, but it had its merits as a distraction. 

_Can I have another one?_

"Not now.  Later."

_When is later?_

"Sometime."

_Now?_

"No, not now."

 _Ada, stop it_ , Alan told her, looking behind him without pause.  _It's my turn._

_But I want another one!_

_You can have it when my turn is over._

_But when?_

"Ada!" Edward snapped.  "Enough!"

She went quiet, and as always he regretted losing his temper, but when she refused to listen he didn't have much of a choice!

"If you listen, I don't have to snap at you," he said in a calmer voice.  "I don't want to be angry with you.   I always listen to you, don't I?"

She made a small noise of acknowledgement but that was all.

"Then you should listen to me.  It's the respectful thing to do."

 _I just like to have it_ , she said quietly.

"I know.  I like to have it too.  We all like to have it.  So we all have to take turns so we can each have it."  Never in his life had he imagined having this conversation.  He had once contemplated similar things, but that had been many years ago, before he had gotten into this business.  He had dreamed of finding some beautiful woman, and they would have a beautiful little girl that he would spoil and love and accept no matter what, and he would prove if only to himself that he was not his father's son.  He should have done that, should have taken his being caught in the Bat's computer to get out of criminality altogether and do something nicer with his life, but he hadn't.  He had joyfully thrown himself deeper into the mess and now he barely had anything left with which to pull himself out. 

Could he have lived that life?  Would having a family been enough to satisfy him, to fulfill him, to... to _fix_ him?  Would the fever in his brain have faded, or would it have worsened in the face of such easy normality? 

Would he have been okay?

 _Dad_?

For a second he thought the daydream was reality, and reality some daydream itself.  That he did have a son, and his voice sounded a little automated which was weird and yet not unheard of.  For one crazy second he thought that perhaps he had gotten out after all and realised that chasing down a mysterious Bat for the rest of his life was really very stupid, and he hadn't done it after all, but then he blinked and that thought melted into the gritty dimness of the fairgrounds he'd halted in his walk towards.  Alan was standing five feet away and gripping the cane nervously as Ada pulled on his arm, looking up at him.  The breath he took was unsteady.  "What is it?"  His tone was level at least.

 _What's wrong?_ Alan asked.

"Nothing," Edward said, and of course it was not the truth but it wasn't as though he could _say_ it!  "Everything's fine.  Let's keep going." 

As soon as he stepped into the bathroom he remembered the mirror and turned around before they had quite made it in, saying, "Why don't you two do something outside.  I can do this without supervision."

Ada happily obliged but Alan did not.  Edward pressed his teeth together and dug his fingers into the perforation on the back of the razor's package.  It was a ladies' moisturising razor, which he was honestly glad of; he could shave without cream just fine, of course, but it simply felt horrible.  He crouched down under the bank of sinks, turning off the water for the one beneath the mirror he'd ruined and opening a new one.  He knew that two of them worked, and now was time to make use of the other.

"Sticking around then, Alan?" he asked, pulling the razor out of the package.  Alan nodded and pulled himself onto the countertop.  He was far from needing help doing that, but Edward put a hand on his arm anyway. 

_You use that to fix your face, right?_

Edward frowned at him.  " _Fix_ it?"

Alan shrugged.  _You don't look like you when you don't have one of those to use._  

Edward looked at his reflection for a moment before dropping his eyes to the faucet.  He couldn't say he really recognised himself just now either. 

But Alan wasn't talking about that.  He was referring to his facial recognition software, which increasingly failed to identify Edward as he had never programmed it to deal with things like facial hair.  It hadn't been a priority at the time.  In fact, he was uncertain that his robots would recognise him at all if he were back to peak efficiency.  He knew that sleeplessness and stress had ground new lines into not only his face but his hands as well, that he had lost a lot of weight in the past year, that he wasn't even combing his hair the same way or wearing the same glasses he used to.  Now that the game was over he fully intended to pick up his life and try to reassemble it into something more reflective of what he should have done with it in the first place, but he barely even knew what that was supposed to _be_.  It was almost... heartbreaking, that his children should only know and recognise him at his very worst, when he should always have been at his best for them. 

Out of the corner of his eye the numbers he'd written on the other mirror seemed to glow faintly, and he forced himself to move onto the other half of his face before he was quite ready so that he couldn't look any further.  As he continued, so did Alan’s odd silence.  He was going to have to do something about that.

Edward had the feeling he was supposed to _say_ something in these situations.  Something... paternal.  He frowned a little. 

Ahhhhh.  He might have it.  “Son?”

 _Yes_?

“Is everything all right?”

Alan seemed to consider his answer a rather long time.  _Yes_.

Now what?  He was _positive_ that wasn’t the truth, but Alan _always_ told the truth.  Perhaps Edward was just reading him wrong.  It irked him, but he hadn’t seen Alan in a while.  Perhaps he was still affected by the medication as well.  He’d have to let it go.

 _Dad,_ Alan said quietly, and when Edward glanced at him he saw he was twisting one of his thumbs which _always_ meant bad news.  

“Mmhm?”

_Maybe… maybe not everything is._

“What is it,” Edward said, putting down the razor.  It seemed it was going to have to wait.

 _I lied to you_.

Edward was shocked in that moment.  _Alan_ had _lied_?  _Alan_?  He’d never met anyone more trustworthy in his entire _life_.  His mouth was inexorably dry.  If Alan had found a reason to lie to him the truth must be very, very bad.

“All right.”  He resolved to keep calm.  Alan was staring down at his entwined hands; he obviously felt terrible about lying, and he didn’t need Edward to make it worse.  He was a little angry about it, but Alan had to have a good reason.

_Nikola didn’t wander off, Dad.  Nikola’s broken._

Edward leaned back against the sink.  He was, honestly, not all that shook up over it.  Nikola was only one step up from the combat bots.  There wasn’t much to him, and Edward had never really spent any time with him. 

 _I tried so hard to fix him_ , Alan was saying.  _But he’s just too broken.  He’s all melted and I replaced everything I could but he won’t turn on.  I’m sorry, Dad.  I’m so sorry._

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Edward asked, in what he hoped was an open sort of way.  He didn’t want Alan to feel worse, but he had to know why Alan had lied to him.  He was afraid he already knew what the answer was, and that it was one he didn’t want to hear.  But he had to know anyway.  He found himself wringing his own hands together and forced himself to stop.  He had to fold his arms to do so, which was not very welcoming, but better than the alternative.

 _Because I failed you_ , Alan answered, very quietly.  _You asked me to keep them safe and I didn’t.  I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me.  I wanted you to be proud like you were when you left.  So I lied and now you’re probably even more disappointed.  It’s okay if you’re not proud of me anymore.  I don’t deserve it.  I’m sorry for lying._

Somehow, what Alan had said was even worse than what Edward had been afraid he’d say.  That being that he had lied because he was afraid Edward was going to yell, or to hit him.  But no.  Of course not.  Because Alan was not him, and yet he kept thinking of him that way regardless.

“I’m not upset with you,” Edward told him.  “Alan, that wasn’t your fault.”

 _It was!_ Alan protested, and now he looked up.  _I should have told Nikola to get out himself, but he had to help Ada and then he got stuck and –_

“That was my fault,” Edward heard himself saying.  And it tightened his throat, because he _hated_ saying that, but it had been.  He sat down on the floor and held a hand up to indicate Alan should join him.  He did so, but maintained his distance.  Edward shook his head.  “Come here, son.”

It hurt a great deal when Alan climbed into his lap, and even more when Alan pressed himself into Edward’s already severely bruised body, but… it was nothing compared to this other pain, one that made his chest ache and caused him to hold his son perhaps tighter than was wise.  He knew what it was – empathy, which he felt only rarely – and he hated it.  The only other person he’d ever felt it for was Jonathan, and if he were quite frank with himself Jonathan did indeed deserve much of the suffering that was inflicted upon him.  But Alan did not.  Alan did not deserve to suffer, because he was only a boy who tried to make his father proud.  He didn’t deserve to feel so guilty for something that had not been his fault.  “It wasn’t because of you,” Edward told him in a low voice.  “It was me.  You did nothing wrong.”

 _It_ wasn’t _your fault.  You weren’t even_ there _!_

“No,” Edward said heavily, “but it was… revenge for something else I did.  She was punishing me.  I made a mistake and you got caught up in it.  I… I’m sorry, Alan.”

 _Nikola thought you weren’t coming back_ , Alan said, in his approximation of a whisper.  _He kept saying you weren’t.  I was starting to believe him._

He had the sudden, terrible urge to tell Alan everything, just so the poor boy could finally _know_ what the hell was going on, but Alan wouldn’t understand any of it.  He had no context clues to tell him what the significance of anything Edward would say was.  “I was in prison,” he said anyway.  “The business I was taking care of was illegal.  I got caught.  I’m supposed to be in prison still, but I escaped.”

_How long were you supposed to be there for?_

“The rest of my life, probably.”

He winced as Alan hugged him more tightly.  He wasn’t going to say anything if he could help it, but God that hurt.

_You don’t belong there.  You belong here.  I missed you so much._

“Thank you for the package,” Edward remembered to say.  “It was helpful.”

 _We just wanted you to know we didn’t forget about you_.

“I would never think that.”

Alan sat back, and Edward couldn’t say he was displeased. He stood up with a little help from the wall and said,

“I’m going to finish shaving and then you need to take me to wherever you’ve left Nikola.”

Alan nodded and climbed back up on the sink again.  Edward put his attention to shaving so that he could at least _pretend_ he was somewhat clean, and when he’d finished he put down the razor.

He took one moment to comb out his hair with moistened fingers, then moved over to the floorboard to hide the razor beneath it.  He put a hand on Alan’s shoulder.  “Show me where Nikola is.”

Alan nodded and walked out of the room, Edward behind him.

Alan had been keeping Nikola inside the toystore itself, in a dark corner on the second floor, and it was too dark for Edward to really see anything without his custom glasses but what he could see did not look good.  What was left of Nikola was a melted, mangled mess, and from what Edward could tell his battery had just melted in the heat from the explosion.  He took a long breath and let it out through his nose, rubbing his eyes.  He needed a cigarette. 

 _It’s bad_ , Alan said.  Edward nodded.

“I’m afraid Nikola’s had his run,” Edward said.  “We can bury him, if you like.”

_Bury him?_

Edward rubbed his arms.  He kept forgetting to change his clothes, and it was drafty in here.  “It’s… what you do with people who have died.  It’s a way of saying goodbye.”

 _I’d like that_ , Alan said, and it took them about an hour but they brought all the pieces of Nikola out behind the store and Alan dug the hole.  He would not allow Edward to do it, nor would he tell Edward where he had gotten the shovel from, so Edward just leaned against the wall and waited for him to finish.  When they had him moved into the hole Alan stood there looking down at Nikola, and said finally, _I’m sorry, Nikola._

Edward, to his shame, had nothing to say.

 _Should we have had Ada come out here with us?_ Alan asked as they went around to the front of the establishment, and truth be told Edward had spent about an hour asking him _self_ that question.  But now he only shook his head.

“Ada wouldn’t understand and I…”  He grimaced.  “I don’t have time to explain it to her.  I know that sounds _reprehensible_ but – “

 _I understand,_ Alan said.  _What’s next?_

He opened the door for Alan to enter the store ahead of him.  “I need to rescue Jonathan from the GCPD.”

Alan stopped in the middle of the room.  _Jonathan._

“I know you don’t like him, Alan, but – “

_I just think maybe he should be rescuing you by now._

Edward sat back down and looked at the suitcases.  They were his.  Alan must have moved them out of the Orphanage in anticipation of his return.

“Nothing I did was anything I haven’t already done myself.  He just enabled me and gave me a deadline.”  He pulled one of the cases in front of him and unzipped it.  He did not really want to put clean clothes on his dirty body, but it would make him feel a little better.  Perhaps he’d just change his underclothes.  He pulled off the thin cotton tshirt given to him by the GCPD.

Alan came over to sit beside him after he’d redressed, and Edward put an arm around his shoulders.  He’d been thinking of eating as well, but that could wait a little longer.  _So we’re going to rescue him._

Edward nodded.  “He’s not likely to be in good shape.  He was barely holding together before, and now he’s recently been… he got a dose of his own fear toxin, and from what I know he did not take it well.  What he did was even worse than what I was doing.  I don’t believe he got anyone to sympathise with him and make his time of it easier.  He could die there.  I’m not going to allow that.  I’ve spent too long keeping him in one piece.”  His phone interrupted suddenly, and he had to smile when he read the message. 

_Eddie, darling._

_Yes Selina, my dear?_

_How far along are you with my papers?  I’d like to get going._

He hadn’t even made the appropriate calls yet.  _Patience, my kitten.  These things take time._

_Just wanted to make sure I didn’t slip your mind._

He smiled and shook his head.  _Never._

 _Who are you talking to?_ Alan asked.

“Selina,” he answered absently, more focused on his thumbs. 

_The person who destroyed the factory?_

Edward didn’t think Alan had ever sounded _incredulous_ before.

“Yes.”

_You’re in love with her too._

“I am not,” Edward said, laughing.  “She is only a friend.”

 _I see_.  He did not sound convinced in the slightest.  _Why are you smiling like that then?_

“Like what?”

 _Like you do when Jonathan’s here_.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Alan folded his hands together.  _You’re really good at picking friends who are bad for you._

Edward put the phone down, not a little out of exasperation.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Alan just stood up and began walking away, and Edward called, “Where are you going?”

He shrugged but didn’t really stop.  _I’m tired of fighting with you, Dad._

So Alan hadn’t wanted him to come back after all.

_Why should he have?  He’s right.  He has to fight you on every damned thing._

His phone lit up, and he glanced down at it to find Selina asking where he’d gone.  _I have to talk to my son_ , he sent, then left the phone there on the floor and went out to find Alan.  He hadn’t gone far.  Edward sat down against the wall, about a foot from him, and rubbed his face with one hand.  He was tired all of a sudden.

 _Dad_ –

“I’m _trying_ , Alan,” Edward snapped, not at all in the mood for another lecture.  “I cannot spontaneously become a brand-new person just because you want me to.  I can only do so much at once.  And Canada is not a place where I’m magically doing to change just because it isn’t here.  I’m going to be the same person, only in a different place.”

_You’re just saying that so you don’t have to try when you get there._

“I am _saying_ that because you seem to believe a change in locale is going to transform me instantaneously!”

_Not as long as you keep falling in love with people who hurt you and destroy everything you’ve ever built.  Selina killed Nikola.  And you don’t even seem to care, not even a little bit._

“She did not kill him _,”_ Edward said heavily.  “She didn’t even know he was there.  I tried to tell her, but the three of you were something she would have needed to see to understand, even if she _weren’t_ angry with me.”

 _You still want her to come with us, don’t you.  Except she doesn’t want to come with Jonathan.  Because even_ she _knows you should be staying away from him._

“Perhaps you should just stay here.  It’s becoming clear you’re not going to be happy there.”  And he stood back up, because he didn’t know how much more of this conversation he could take.

 _Stay here?  And do what?  My entire_ life _is dependent on you.  You_ know _that.  You made me this way.  My existence is meaningless without you.  You keep telling me to ‘stay here’ as though that’s an option I can actually take.  Even you can’t be that delusional._

So _this_ was what he really sounded like.

But he was right, so Edward wasn’t going to argue.  He was just going to bite his tongue a little too hard and wish there were cigarettes in one of those suitcases and go back into the store and do something so he could pretend this hadn’t happened for a while.  He twisted the door handle.

_Dad, wait.  I didn’t mean to say that.  I didn’t mean it._

Edward waved one hand listlessly.  “I don’t know what to do with you, Alan.  And to be quite honest, I never did.  It would probably be best if you figured it out yourself instead of giving me infinite chances to make a further mess of it.”

_But you still love me, don’t you?_

He sounded so desperate that Edward paused on the threshold.  He knew none of this was right, none of this was _fair_ , but what could he possibly do?  Alan was too smart.  He knew too much.  Edward could not satisfy him.  He never had and he never would.  He had failed his son, as his father had failed his, and that was the end of it.  He’d always known this would happen, and it had.  He should never have tried in the first place.

“For what it’s worth,” he answered.


	4. Part the Fourth

Part the Fourth

 

 

Edward spent the next several hours working on Jonathan’s damned transmission.  Jonathan had had the F-150 for the last thirty-odd years and it _showed_.  Edward had taken apart the entire transmission and to his chagrin not one component had been spared.  It had been so clear he was going to have to clean them all that he had just acquired a pan and started soaking as much as possible in penetrating oil.

Alan had shown up during the second hour and sat down without saying anything, and Edward had not acknowledged him.  Alan had very nearly become a fight he could not win.  Everything he did was wrong.  Everything he _said_ was wrong.  He was tired.  If Alan was going to continually doubt him, fine.  Alan could come up with his own solutions.

Ada had been playing with some of the measurement pencils he had in his toolbox and she abruptly dropped them all back in.  When he glanced over to see why, he saw that all the leads were dull.  He grimaced.  Great.

 _I’m going outside_! she declared, and he nodded vaguely.

“Don’t go too far.”

She hugged him around the shoulders so tightly he dropped the pliers he was holding and then went on her merry way.  As soon as she had gone out the door Alan asked, _Why don’t you care about what happened to Nikola?_

Of course.

Edward put down the tool he had just retrieved.  “Because I don’t care about Nikola at all.”

_But he was your son._

“Technically,” Edward said.  “I spent no time with him.  I put no thought to him most of the time.  He was little more than the factory-built robots were, other than the fact that I built him by hand.”

_So you didn’t love him._

“No.”

_So you could decide one day that I’m little more than the factory-built robots._

Edward looked up from his fingers.  He’d already _answered_ this question.  There was no way Alan had forgotten the answer.  God, he was already tired.  “What do you want me to say to that, Alan?”

Alan’s eyes were fixed on his own fingers.

“There’s no point in answering if you’re not going to believe me.”

 _I don’t understand why I care about Nikola than you do.  You built him, he’s the reason we even_ call _you dad -_

“He called me that without knowing what it _meant_ ,” Edward interrupted.  “It was just a word to him.  A coincidence.  And I told you.  You don’t have to call me that.”

_I know.  But I wanted to have a dad._

“And you do,” Edward said, spreading his hands.  “I’m doing my best, Alan.  If you cannot take that on faith, then what do you want me to do?”

 _I don’t know._   His voice was very small.

“When you grow up,” Edward said, “you learn that there are two versions of your parents: the ideal and the reality.  If you cannot accept the reality, then you leave.  I know you don’t have anywhere to go, Alan. But you are asking me for solutions to a dilemma that has never before occurred.  I don’t have your answers.  I just do not have them.”

Alan’s hands were pressed together.  Edward went back to rubbing the grease off of his.  He hoped he had left no signs to belay the fact that he was… nervous, almost, about his words.  They weren’t what Alan would want to hear, but… had Edward ever really said anything of the sort?

Now _there_ was a sobering thought.

Alan abruptly got up and knelt down in front of the parts Edward had spread out in front of him.  _What is this for_? he asked.

“It’s from the truck,” Edward told him, glad to move onto a new subject.  “It allows the driver to operate the vehicle appropriately to the road conditions.”

_And you don’t like this truck._

“I hate it,” Edward said bluntly.  “He’s been driving this thing almost as long as I’ve been alive.”

Alan laughed, and he was able to hope that maybe, just maybe, the uncertainty had passed.  It was much easier to do the work with his help.  Edward’s hands had had an uncharacteristic tremor for quite a few days now, and while he hoped that it had, somehow, escaped Alan’s notice, it doubtless hadn’t.

Without Nikola, Edward did have to ask for Alan’s help replacing the transmission after the reconstruction.  He didn’t really _want_ to, but doing it himself would have been impossible and even _with_ Alan’s assistance the thing was heavy enough to strain Edward’s back.  He climbed into the front seat and started the ignition.  It _sounded_ fine.  At the moment he only needed it to last about twenty minutes anyway.  He would do some more work on it when he got back.  He removed the key and pressed it deep into his pocket.  “Is there anything left for food, Alan?” he asked, wiping the grease off his hands as best he could with an already filthy handkerchief, and Alan nodded.

_There’s more soup.  Did you want something else?_

“No, no.  That’s fine.”

He called back Ada and they returned to the store, where he put the soup on the element.  He didn’t actually wait for it to heat up that much; he was far too hungry.  He took a few minutes after he was finished eating to read through his messages, though he left the ones from Selina for later.  Talking to her was fun, but he didn’t have time for fun just now.  And besides.  He wasn’t stupid.  She would drop him as soon as she got her papers.

Ada was in one corner, seemingly attempting to make a new house out of the sparse materials she had at the moment, and he called, “Ada.  Where’s my cane?”

 _I’m using it!_ she answered cheerfully.

He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but… “It’s my turn, princess.”

 _No it’s not,_ was her response.

 _Yes it is,_ Alan said. 

_I don’t think so._

Edward rubbed at his eyes.  “Ada.  Be reasonable.”

 _I_ am _being reasonable!_

“Ada, can I have my cane back _please_ ,” Edward snapped in exasperation, a little more harshly than he meant to.  Her wilful ignorance was grating heavily on his nerves.  She got up, making a show of it, and actually _threw_ the cane down in front of him.  He had to move his legs out of the way to avoid it and snapped, without thinking about it,

_“Augusta!”_

Ada immediately shrank back and stepped into her pile of bricks and broken toys – to hide there, probably – and he knew what he _should_ do just now but could not conjure up the patience to do it.  “I do not have _time_ for this,” he muttered, snatching up the cane and standing.  Alan, who had been silent and still, now asked,

_Where are you going?_

“To bring Jonathan back,” Edward told him, and even though he could feel the truck key in his pocket he still had to check it three times.  He tried to take a calm breath.  All he could think about was how badly he needed a cigarette all of a sudden.

 _Oh._   Alan stood up.  _I should have guessed._

“Where are _you_ going?” Edward demanded.  Alan looked at him as sideways as he was able, seeing as he did not have peripheral vision.

_I’m coming with you, of course._

This, somehow, took the edge off of Edward’s anger.  “I’m not going to ask you to – “

_I didn’t hear you ask._

If he really wanted to come, Edward wasn’t going to be able to stop him.  And he was not going to argue against the extra help.  He pushed his hands into his pockets and his thumb and forefinger automatically felt out the key in the righthand one. 

He looked back at Ada’s hiding place.  He wasn’t sorry for yelling at her; she hadn’t been listening and her actions had, in fact, been rather reprehensible.  So what if she sat in there and thought about how angry he’d been for what she had done.  She would just do it again if he didn’t take a stand, right?

Alan was watching him.

“Ada,” he began, mostly at a loss for what to say.  There had to be something.  Anything.

“You can have it when I get back, princess.”

Then he turned and walked out of the storefront.  He was going to search Jonathan’s glovebox and hope he had some years-old cigarette forgotten in there, and then he was going to bring the man back and get out of this city.  He was tired.  He wanted to go somewhere he could sleep for a very long time and not have to deal with anything at all when he woke up.  If Jonathan were as ill as Edward feared, he wouldn’t have that for quite a long time, so imagination was going to have to serve for now.

Alan sat as far back in the seat of the truck as he could, cane propped up between his knees as Edward felt his way through the glovebox from his position in front of the steering wheel.  He had not had time to clean anything out of the cab and so it was populated with a lot of papers, half-shredded books, and other useless things Jonathan had deposited into it over the years.  By some miracle his fingers closed over a box, and when he pulled it out he saw it was indeed a cigarette holder.  He flipped it over, well aware that he was far too excited about this development.  That was, until he saw how many were inside.  Four.

He stared at them for some moments, biting his tongue.  Willing himself to be counting wrong, somehow.  Four was bad.  Four should have been three or five. 

 _Dad_?

What now?  Did he throw the fourth one out and start from three?  Was it all right if he started from four and left three?  But if he got rid of the fourth one it didn’t mean it had never existed; it was still _wrong_ even if he was pretending it was right -

 _Dad_?  Alan was touching his arm.  He looked at his son without quite recognising him for a second.

“I’m...”  He licked his lips and located a lighter among the newspapers on top of the dashboard.  Alan was looking at him.  He had to pretend he wasn’t having this stupid debate with himself over a _number_.  He picked up one of the cigarettes and lit it.  He inhaled much too deeply and had to hold it out over the steering column until he was able to stop coughing. 

_Are you okay, Dad?_

He was already finished the cigarette and flicked the end out the window.  His fingers were tight against the top of the steering wheel.  If he didn’t admit it, he would have to lie.

“No,” he said.

 _I’ll be right back_ , Alan said.  _Don’t move_.

He couldn’t even if he’d wanted to.  He was frozen, somehow, staring out the windshield as though the answers to all his troubles were going to spontaneously appear there.

He should have just put the cigarette holder back and forgotten he’d ever seen it.  It was a sign. 

It wasn’t a sign.  The counting was meaningless and stupid.  It always had been.  He was far too brilliant to be under the sway of superstition.

But still.  He couldn’t shake the feeling he should have just -

No!  It was just a handful of cigarettes!  That was all!

He realised that his forehead was pressed against the top of the steering wheel.  He didn’t remember putting it there. 

 _Here_ , Alan said, and Edward glanced over to see him holding out a bottle of water.  Edward sat back in the seat and accepted it, opening the lid and focusing on the crack that sounded as he broke the seal.  He held it in between his legs for a moment.

Something felt... wrong.  Really, very wrong.  There was some helplessness in his chest and he had no idea where it was coming from, or why.  He needed to pull himself together.  He needed to get going.  He needed to rescue Jonathan, and then help him recover, and then get up to Canada, and then...

He reached into his back pocket for a fresh handkerchief and tipped the bottle over into it, using it to wet his face and neck three times.  It helped a little bit.  He took a long drink of the water in the hopes one of these actions would calm him down. 

Four.  He should have just put it back.

 _You’re going to be okay, Dad_.

He bit his tongue until the sudden tension in his chest subsided.  Then he twisted the cap onto the bottle and shoved it onto the dashboard.  He had to lean back so he could dig into his pocket for the key and he heard the bench creak in protest.  He thinned his lips.  He’d have to fix that too. 

He turned the engine over three times before putting the truck into gear and pulling out of the warehouse.  Time to get this over with.

 _I didn’t realise until today how hard it is to be a dad,_ Alan said as Edward brought the truck onto the road.  _It must be difficult to be trying your best, but know that your children aren’t appreciating it._

Edward glanced at him.  Where had _this_ come from?  “Children often don’t appreciate their parents until they are grown themselves.  But… “

Alan was looking at him.

“They aren’t supposed to know that,” Edward continued, as best he could without really knowing what he was talking about.  “A child isn’t supposed to be _grateful_ to exist.”

 _I am_ , Alan said.  _And I’ll talk to Ada when we get back.  Sometimes she’s more willing to listen to me._

He grimaced.  Of course she was.  Of course she would not listen to her own father.  That was just how it went, wasn’t it?  That was just the kind of thing a man should expect from his –

He stalled the engine downshifting for a red light and slammed the stick into neutral in frustration.  First he didn’t know how to parent, now he didn’t know how to _drive_.  Great.  Just _great_ –

 _Would you like me to drive?_ Alan asked, incredibly politely in fact, and Edward had to bite down on his tongue to keep himself in check. 

“No, thank you,” he answered with as much forced calm as he could gather, wondering all the while what the hell was going on.  Had he always been this irascible?  In all honesty he had no idea.  He knew Jonathan had remarked once or twice on it, but he had a tendency to exaggerate to spur Edward into action. 

 _Your hands have been a little unsteady since you came back_ , Alan remarked, still with that curated courtesy.  _Did something happen at the police station?_

He had to think about it.  The memory of it was… hazy.  It was unnerving, the way his perceptions of that time would come in and out, when the entirety of his history otherwise was crystal clear.  And just _what_ had caused that, again?

“There was… medicine,” he said.  “I… they made me take medication.”  What type was slipping his mind, if he’d ever known.

_I don’t know what that is._

This conversation would be good for helping to keep his focus.  “The human brain operates partially on the whim of various chemicals that are, ideally, put into production by the brain itself.  Medication is a method by which one can introduce chemicals externally, for various reasons.”

_What was the one they gave you for?_

Well.  He couldn’t really _say_ , given that he had not had the opportunity to _ask_ , but…

“They were sedating me,” was his answer.  “So I wouldn’t escape or be a bother to them.  Or both, I suppose.”

Alan had slipped his fingers together and was repeatedly overlaying his thumbs.  _That kind of… bothers me._

Edward moved back into first and continued driving when the light shone green.  “It no longer matters.”

_You’re not going to do anything about it?_

Edward raised one hand from the steering wheel in an expansive gesture and replaced it.  “If I were going to do that, we’d never leave.”

 _Oh_ , Alan said, and it sounded as though he understood. 

“That’s the thing about vengeance,” Edward went on, squinting in the direction of the GCPD parking lot.  The lights were out and he couldn’t see if there were any spaces.  He elected to pull up in front of the entrance instead.  “It usually doesn’t end.”

 _That makes sense._   Alan put his hand on the doorhandle, but paused when he saw Edward still had his hands on the wheel.  He looked over at Alan.

“The crux of it is,” he said quietly, to make it real, “that I need to get out of here while I still want to.”

He didn’t think he’d have to explain to Alan what that meant. 

Edward accepted the cane from Alan before they got to the heavy doors of the GCPD, which Alan pushed open without any trouble.  He didn’t anticipate too much resistance, not at this time, but he still did his best to be alert and cautious.  It was… difficult.  Some part of his mind was still hung up on those cigarettes.  As though he hadn’t done enough to make up for having one of them.  As though any of it meant anything at all.

There was one person manning the front desk, eyes half-lidded as he gazed at the monitor in front of him.  After a quiet affirmation from Alan that there was no one else in the room, Edward took the cane from him and stepped forward carefully.  The man looked up and immediately froze.  “Oh.  It’s… it’s you,” he said, with something approaching manufactured bluster.  “What, did you… uh… forget to tell us a riddle when you left?”

Edward didn’t know whether to be angry or insulted.

“Why do you simpletons always act like _all_ I ever do is tell _riddles_?” he asked, walking forward and waving his free hand in discontent.  “Get out of here before I have to do something violent.”

The man, to his immense disappointment, reached for the phone on the desk instead, and unfortunately Edward could not let him do that.  It would be a simple matter to dispatch this minor hitch in his plans.  At least, he hoped so.  Things _seemed_ to be going well, but his still markedly unsteady hands seemed a reflection of his train of thought.  He could not banish the sight of the four cigarettes from his mind’s eye.  And he needed to, because it was incredibly distracting.  As well as very, very stupid.

“Alan,” he commanded, knowing he had only moments before the phone dialled out someplace unfortunate, “mind the hallway, will you?”

As Alan did so Edward whipped his cane across the desktop, sweeping the phone as well as a great deal of papers and file folders onto the floor.  The man at the desk shoved back his chair with admirable urgency, stumbling out of it to reach anew for the receiver, but Edward slapped his hand out of the way with the narrow end of the cane, which he then thrust downward into the phone to eliminate that avenue.  Left with no recourse, legs tangled with those of his chair, the man below him presented his palms in surrender.  “Wait,” he said, voice quavering as much as the both of their hands.  “Wait, I was just – “

“I gave you a choice,” Edward interrupted, pressing his right foot into the man’s shoulder and forcing him down against the floor.  “You elected to take the wrong one.”  He rested the head of the cane beside his other foot and unscrewed the end of it, revealing the hidden blade there.

“No, please, you – “

Edward drove his cane into the man’s chest and removed the base holding the blade so that it remained in place, afterward reattaching the end of the cane.  There weren’t a lot of options when one was forced to stab a man; most of them were quite messy, and Edward preferred not to become soaked in blood if he could help it.  This man would possibly suffocate long before enough blood leaked around the knife for him to cease living, but Edward was not particularly concerned about that.  He’d been removed from the equation and that was all he needed to know.  He took a moment to shove the man underneath the desk with some effort from his foot and then called out for Alan to return.

“All right,” Edward said, moving in front of the keyboard.  “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The systems were simple to access - their passwords hadn’t gotten any better since he’d left - and he quickly located the prisoner lists.  Crane, Crane -

All thought was banished from his mind the moment he saw the cell number.  Four.

He found himself sitting down in the chair.  Breathing was difficult, suddenly.  His hands were definitely shaking against the keyboard, but he couldn’t move them.  Four.

He had to stop.  He had to wait.  If he continued on now -

 _Dad_?

Oh... not in front of his _son_.

“What,” he said shortly. 

 _You don’t look good_.

He didn’t _feel_ good, either.  His pulse was a little too loud in his ears and he felt ill suddenly.  He had to do something about that number.  That number was bad, that number was -

It was just a number. 

It couldn’t be, though.  Once, yes.  Twice?  How could it be just a number twice?

 _Do you need something_?

He opened his mouth and then closed it.  He couldn’t give Alan an answer because he didn’t _know_.

He was going to have to do _something_.  He couldn’t ignore this.  Even if he managed to do it, another four would appear and then he would _know_ and -

He pulled open the desk drawer and dug around inside of it.  Three pencils.  Two blue pens.  Four - five highlighters.  And one of them was green.  He picked it up, almost immediately feeling the tension ease. All right.  He was fine.  He would deal with this quickly and then move on.

He uncapped the marker and wrote out the sequence for two pages of the notebook on the desk.  Much better.  He could think straight now.  He pushed the notebook parallel with the desk’s edge and laid the highlighter down in line as well.  Alan had been watching quietly all the while, but now he said:

 _Why do you do that_?

“Not now,” Edward told him quietly, standing.  “Let’s go.”

Edward initially began directing them down the halls of the precinct, but he deferred to Alan when he had to be pulled out of an incoming officer’s line of sight more than once.  He was too anxious to be rankled by this.  He couldn’t get the stupid number out of his head, or the ridiculous urge to do something equally stupid in an attempt to make up for it.  It was incredibly distracting and he was increasingly confused.  It had never been this bad before.  He always ignored it as much as possible and that was usually that, but not now.  Now he was so caught up in it Alan had to keep a hand on his arm and he kept glancing back at Edward as though he thought he was going to wander off.  And to be quite honest with himself, he was unsure whether he wouldn’t.

Once they reached the cell, Edward finally had something tangible to distract him and set his hands to picking the door lock.  It sprang without much trouble and he pushed aside the gate.  “Keep an eye out,” he told Alan, who nodded and stood against the wall opposite the door, looking down the hallway.

Jonathan was on his side on the cot, half-curled, shivering violently with the sheet tangled around his upper thighs.  His skin was nearly translucent, the mass of blue veins beneath almost clearly visible, though his face was flushed with heat.  The brace Edward had built had been removed and an ace bandage cursorily applied to his leg, but other than that Jonathan had clearly received no medical care.  Between being untreated and the fact that the little energy Jonathan had was obviously being used to combat his sickness, many of the wounds that had never quite healed from his encounter in the Asylum had opened and were beginning to fester again. 

Helplessness and anger clenched Edward's chest for a long moment.  All right, so he had gassed the entire city and meant to let it tear itself apart through fear, so what?  That was no reason to leave him to die in a jail cell!  Edward would have liked to see the average person get mauled by a mutant crocodile and come out of it as strong as Jonathan had, with only the aid of Edward's admittedly good medical knowledge and the hand of a disinterested plastic surgeon!  Most people would have lain in self-pity for years, but not Jonathan!  Jonathan had gotten back in the game long before he should have and that was something to be admired!  The stupidity of the general public never failed to astound him.

He knelt down next to the bed and took one of Jonathan's curled hands.  It was cold.  All of the heat in his body was invested in his fever.  His every breath shuddered in and out of his lungs and he looked more distressed than Edward had ever seen.  The Bat had trapped him in a toxin nightmare and the people of Gotham had condemned him to an eternal fever dream.  Jonathan did not deserve to die, shivering and unable to wake.  Edward was going to fix this.  He was taking Jonathan and they were leaving the city, leaving the country.  He was done with Gotham.  The Bat could have it and good riddance.

"Jonathan," Edward said, voice low, and before all of this that would have been enough to wake him.  Now, however, he had no idea what would. Alan put a hand on Jonathan's bandaged knee.

 _He looks very bad_ , Alan said.

"He is very bad," Edward answered, and he had to consciously loosen his fingers before he added to the violet that bloomed beneath Jonathan's splintered fingernails.  The right hand was in a better state than the left, though not by much.  "He's very sick.  That's why we're here.  But I need something before we can take him.  Look at your layout of the GCPD.  Do you see the evidence and confiscation rooms?"

 _Yes_ , Alan said immediately.

"You’ve seen the brace for his leg before.  Find it and bring it back here.  Quickly.  And Alan -"  He put his hand on his arm and looked him in the eye soberly.  "Be careful."

Alan nodded and gripped Edward's arm for a moment _.  I will_ , he said. 

When he had gone Edward was left alone with what remained of his friend.  Of the only man who had ever given him any respect at all.  Shivering and craven and close to death.  "Jonathan," he said, hoping that on some level he was heard even though Jonathan could not respond.  "I see you’ve done me the favour of clinging onto life a little longer."  He used his free hand to pull the sheet up higher, not that it would make a whole lot of difference.  "Just another few minutes and we’ll away to more conducive environs."

Alan returned a minute or so after that, and Edward folded back the sheet and reattached the brace to his leg.  His knee had swollen up again, visible even through the bandage.  Edward’s lips thinned.  It would have been helpful if Jonathan had cared a whit about his own health.  It would not have gotten this bad if –

No.  No, it wasn’t the time for that.  He could argue the point with Jonathan later.  It was time right now to get out of here.  If he were caught it would be the end of everything.

Alan picked up the cane and they made their way quickly back towards the entrance, Edward doing his best to keep Jonathan’s body from colliding with anything.  He wished the man were heavier.  He barely seemed to exist even pressed against Edward’s chest.

Alan held the front entrance open for him and he finally felt some relief that this endeavour was coming to an end.  Sneaking around a police station with a grown man and an adult-sized robot was not the smartest idea, and not one Edward would have put into action if he’d had much of a choice.  Alan leaned the cane against the body of the truck and opened the door.  “Thank you,” Edward said, leaning inside of it.  God, did he wish this thing had running boards.

Alan looked up suddenly but before Edward could ask why there was the sharp ping of metal against metal and there was a sudden searing pain in his right arm.  He instinctively pressed his left hand around it and looked behind him. 

There was a lone officer there.  No stars.  Just a man with a gun held out at eye level with shaking hands.  Edward frowned and took his hand away from his arm.  It was bleeding rather inconveniently.

 _Dad_.  Alan put a hand on his shoulder.  He shook his head.

“I’m fine,” he said, when he realised Alan had no real concept of the damage done here.  “It looks a lot worse than it is.  I promise.”  It didn’t even hurt that much.

 _Okay_ , Alan said.

“I got him!” the officer shouted into his radio.  Edward’s eyes narrowed.

“Like hell you have,” he muttered, and Alan actually laughed.  Well, at least he wasn’t afraid.

“Freeze, Nygma!” the officer called out.  “The next shot won’t be so friendly!”

Edward had managed to settle Jonathan into the front passenger seat by then, and he looked over his shoulder incredulously.

“ _Friendly_?  My friends are all criminals and even _they_ don’t shoot at me and then claim to be _altruist_.”

The officer adjusted his hands on the grip of his pistol.  “You want to come back here or not?”

During this Alan had crossed the space between them, and he held out his hand towards the officer.  _Can I have that, please_ , he said.  The other just stared at him with wide eyes.

“I suggest you give it to him,” Edward called.  “Just hand it over and we won’t have any problems.”

“All – all right.”  And he actually placed the gun into Alan’s hand.

 _What should I do with this?_ he asked, and Edward gestured for him to approach.  He would use that to replace Jonathan’s Smith  & Wesson that had disappeared when the GCPD had so rudely trampled their way through his Orphanage.  Alan began walking towards him when someone shouted, “Get down!” and three more officers appeared from around the side of the building, the man in front holding his gun out.  The other two held only flashlights.  Rent-a-cops, possibly.  He couldn’t sight any other guns, however, which was deeply in his favour.  Edward took the cane from where it was leaning against the truck and stepped forward.  This was probably going to need more... physical persuasion. 

Alan turned around, raising his free hand towards the first officer.  _You don’t need that,_ he said.

The first officer raised his weapon and fired six shots into the top of Alan’s head.  It was loud.  So loud, in fact, it seemed to be the only sound in all the world.  The sound of his very own footsteps had vanished.  The lips of the men in front of him were moving and yet communicated nothing.   

It was almost like some scene out of a post-modern indie film, the way the bullet casings traced their obscenely slow descent.  They nestled into the ground below with a sort of odd, nearly animate grace, the reflected light from one of the flashlights lending a nearly blinding gleam.  It was so surreal, in fact, he couldn’t be certain he was truly seeing it.  Perhaps he wasn’t.  Perhaps none of this was.

He was motionless, suddenly.  Walking seemed the most impossible thing he’d ever have to do.  All there was in the entirety of existence was the horrible electronic grinding noise of Alan crumpling to the ground in front of him.  He was looking down and yet really seeing nothing at all, and when he raised his head they were all staring at him.  The acrid smoke borne by burning circuitry seemed to tear a hole in the back of his throat.

“You killed him,” he heard himself say, as though he were somewhere beyond himself.  “You killed my son.”

“What?” the officer - the murderer - said, as though Edward’s words were senseless.

He took another step, just to make sure he still could.  It was hard.  It was very, very hard.

“You killed my son.”

“What the hell is he talking about?”

“Who _ever_ knows what he’s talking about.  Nygma!  Drop your weapon and put your hands up.”

Weapon?  What… oh.  The cane was still in his hand.  He couldn’t feel it.  He couldn’t feel _anything_ , not really.  He didn’t seem to be physically _there_.  Because something had just happened.  Something he didn’t want to remember.

“Just shoot him!”

“I’m not doing that!  Can you _imagine_ the amount of _paperwork_ Gordon would be after me to do?”

Four… four officers.

There was a sudden, awful lightning realisation in his chest.  Oh _no_.  Oh, it _hadn’t…_ it was all _real_ and he should have _listened_ –

“Halt, Nygma.  Take one more step –“

He hadn’t realised he’d been walking.  He wasn’t going to stop.  He could feel the rust and the flaking paint of the once-smooth surface of the cane against his palm and he knew exactly what he needed to do with it.  He would kill them and it would all be over.  Everything would be fine.  He closed his eyes for one long moment, willing that he would return to himself.  And he did, and he wished he hadn’t.  His breaths were coming too quickly.  There was blood in his mouth because he had at sometime clamped his teeth around his tongue.  His throat seemed to have constricted to half the size, and the remainder of that space was occupied by the strength of his pulse.  And his ears were still ringing from gunshots he didn’t remember hearing.  But something told him he had heard them.  That same something told him there was only way out of this.  His fingers tightened around the metal rod in his hand.

He didn’t know what he was doing here anymore.  He seemed only to exist from one moment to the next, with neither a past nor a future, and it was with this disconnect driving him that he closed the space between himself and the men in front of him and drove the head of his cane into the skull of the first person he reached.  “Fuck you,” he whispered, somehow not really seeing the collapse of the man before him, nor that of the other three whom he dispatched with an equal measure of thoughtless force deep into the top of their heads.  “Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you too.”

He tried and failed to recall why he was even here.  What he was even doing.  There were four police officers on the ground in front of him, and all of them four with their skulls caved in.  There was rather a lot of blood streaking his clothes.  Passively he concluded that he must have killed them, and certainly _for_ some very important reason, given the violence, but if that were so then… then why didn’t he feel any better?

Why were his ears ringing?

It was with immense difficulty that he looked away from the steadily widening pool of blood, quite near to soaking into his shoes, and he did recognise now that he was at the GCPD.  All right.  That made sense.  Behind him was… Jonathan’s pickup truck.

Oh.  Oh, that was right.  He’d been here to… his brows came together in a spasmodic confusion.  Well, if Jonathan was in the truck, and Edward was here, then where was…

He saw it all again, suddenly, as though history were physically repeating itself before his eyes, and though he remembered now where his son had gone he could not bring himself to look.  If he looked, then… well, he wouldn’t.  And then maybe… maybe all of this would go away.  Yes.  He would just stay here, and wait, and something would happen.  Something…

No.  No, nothing would.  He’d been warned.  The numbers had cautioned him, and he had ignored them.  Four cigarettes, the fourth cell, four officers.  It had all been laid out in front of him and he had ignored it.  He’d known better and he’d done all of this anyway.  It was permanent, irreversible, and more importantly, entirely.  His.  Fault.

He had, at long last, finally failed his son.

The cane slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a thud he did not hear, because the world had again gone still and silent and so had he. 

_I’m not going to be okay, Alan._


	5. Part the Fifth

Part the Fifth

 

He felt as though he were supposed to be doing something.

He couldn’t imagine what.  It seemed as though he’d been disconnected from himself, somehow, and he was disoriented in the midst of an uneasy limbo with no real idea of which direction he should try.  It was a detachment of an extreme he’d never thought possible.

He could almost… _hear_ something, maybe.  He had the passing thought that police sirens had been engineered so that they could not fade into a passively heard pattern and went back to wondering where he even was, just then.  He couldn’t remember.  What was right in front of him was not condensing into any useful knowledge.  He wasn’t particularly bothered by the fact that moving to look someplace else seemed impossible.

He had the sense that he couldn’t stay there forever, wherever he was, and put his mind to working out just what was going on.  The last clear memory was… a number.  Four.  He knew this thought brought his brows together but the sensation of it was nearly lost on him.  What did _that_

Police sirens.

All of a sudden he was looking behind him, and he was realising his hands were sticky and his breath was short and he had the creeping, terrible feeling that he’d been trying to avoid thinking about something.

He looked down to his left to see what was pressing against his leg and as soon as he saw his cane there, streaked in blood that had already cooled dark red, his breath caught in his throat as the entire evening seemed to descend upon his mind again in the course of a single second.  The gunshots were echoing impossibly.

The sirens.  Wait.  That hadn’t been part of –

He gripped the cane in hands that were inexplicably unsteady and used it to push himself to his feet.  He needed to get out of here.  If he was still here when these new officers showed up, his son would have –

He bit his tongue afresh until he tasted iron and that was enough to distract him.  And he needed a distraction direly at this point, because he had just had the horrible sick realisation that _he had to leave him here –_

He somehow got the door of the truck open and dropped the cane in his attempt to use a third hand he’d managed to forget he didn’t have.  He slammed the door shut, hoping the sound would snap him back to clarity.  His hand had enough trouble turning the key three times in the ignition that he concluded it hadn’t worked.

 _Calisse_.  It had all gone so wrong... 

He couldn’t even keep his hand steady against the gearshift.  He kept overshooting first and sending the stick into second, and every time he did that the truck would lurch forward and then shut off.  He took his hand off the shifter and pressed both of his palms into the top of the steering wheel.   It was time to calm down.  He wasn’t going to think about how he’d gotten here, or why he was trying not to think about it, he was just going to very calmly restart the engine of the truck and go back to the toy store. 

“I hate this damn thing,” he muttered, even though Jonathan was unconscious.  In the case that he hadn’t been, the outcome wouldn’t have been all that different, anyway.

Driving it was even more difficult and onerous than usual.  He was having trouble seeing straight.  He kept thinking he was back at the GCPD with the glare of the fallen flashlights passively catching the corner of his eye.  And he kept hearing the gunshots, over and over and over again, which meant he was missing the cue to change gears.  He almost ran a red light and once he had abruptly stopped the truck over the line he leaned the back of his head against the top of the seat.  He was going to have to rebuild the transmission _again_ if he kept on like this.

He tried to care about that.  He couldn’t.  It didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  But he was going to have to pretend things did anyway.

He was not honestly sure _how_ he managed to get back to the toy store in one piece.  He could not wrangle his focus long enough to really pay attention to where he was going, and sitting in the truck outside of it now, he could not recall very much of the journey.  There had been some stoplights.  A deep pothole that had brought no reaction out of either Edward nor Jonathan.  The sun was coming up.  He must have been sitting here outside of the toy store for quite a long time.  He had no idea.  He barely knew what the dashboard in front of him looked like.  He was just sitting there, his brain attempting to force him to acknowledge what he’d seen while simultaneously disallowing him from doing so.  He was very tired suddenly.  Turning his head was difficult, after having been still for so long.  Jonathan had not moved.  It was possible he’d never move again.  It was possible Edward had done all of this for nothing.

“If you die,” he mumbled mostly to himself, “I will kill you.”

Jonathan, of course, did not say anything. 

It occurred to him he should get inside the toy store before someone came by and saw him parked out here like this, and it took him a minute but he managed to gather himself enough to push the door open.  All right.  Now he just had to pick up Jonathan and

He should have picked up –

He couldn’t lift him.  He already knew that.  It was a fact.

He could have _tried_ –

He hadn’t had the time.  It was a fact.

If he hadn’t spent so much time sitting there –

But he had.  It was a fact.

And the next fact was that he had to bring Jonathan inside.  All right.  He was going to do that.

He got out of the truck and pulled Jonathan forward so he could lean him into his chest again.  Jonathan took up too much space to enable him to close the door and he had forgotten to remove the keys from the ignition, but it didn’t matter.  Nobody was going to steal the stupid thing anyway.  Somehow he got the door open and stepped inside, where he had to squint in order to see where he was going.  Ada jumped up from her corner and ran towards him.  _Hi Dad!_ she announced, stopping short when she saw Jonathan.  _Oh, Dad,_ she said, getting on her knees to look as Edward laid him on the floor.  _He is not looking good, this guy._

“I know,” Edward said tiredly.

_And you look kinda dirty._

He looked at himself disinterestedly.  Dried blood and the dirt he’d been kneeling in marked his clothes.  He had the feeling he was supposed to care about that.  He was hearing sirens again but the view beyond the open door behind him revealed nothing there.

_And Dad!  Where’s Alan?  I wanna play with him now._

“He’s…” 

God.  He felt… ill, suddenly.  Not nauseous, but _sick_ , all over, and the air in the dark room seemed to have increased in density.  He couldn’t stay here.  He had to get out of here.  He stood, nearly falling back to the floor in his stumbling.  “Give him the blanket,” he demanded of Ada, in a tone so harsh she shrank back a little.  He didn’t care.  He hadn’t _meant_ to do it, and besides, he had _bigger_ problems right now!  “I’m going outside.  Stay here.”

 _Dad, wait,_ Ada said, running up to him and holding something out.  His… phone.  He could not imagine being able to come up with the energy to be able to use it.

 _Someone wants to talk to you bad,_ she told him sombrely, and he accepted it from her without much interest.  Pressing one of the buttons on it revealed a spate of messages from… Selina, of all people.  His thumb slowly scrolled through the notifications, but the only ones he really understood read, _I heard what happened_ and _Are you okay_?

What did that even mean, really.

He looked down at the screen and decided she had gone to enough effort, at least, to deserve a response.  And he didn’t want her running down here.  He wanted to be left alone.  He would give her what she wanted and that would be that.  As usual.

 _They killed my son_ , he told her, and as soon as it really came to him what he had written the phone suddenly became an unbearable burden his hand could not contain and he dropped it on the floor.  The screen was black in the places the fresh cracks had not spread.  Well.  That solved that.

 _Oops,_ said Ada, picking it up and handing it to him, and he put it into his pocket for no real reason.  He wasn’t certain of his motivations for anything at the moment.  But he needed to get outside.  He had just remembered what he’d been doing and the room had spontaneously become suffocating once more.  “Do what I told you.”

 _I am, Dad,_ Ada said, scurrying to carry out his instructions, and he opened the door to make his exit.  He winced at the sun which had come out beyond his notice.  He made his way around to the side of the building and sat down against the wall there, knees drawn up and arms over top them.  He kept his thoughts as minimal as possible.  He wasn’t going to think about it.  Everything was fine.  He just needed to rest for a little while, that was all.  And then he’d get back to work.  He had a lot to do.  He was going to do it.  Soon, he was going to do it soon.  He was going to get out of here.  He was going to _make_ everything okay.

He didn’t remember putting his head onto his arms, or closing his eyes for that matter, but even the realisation didn’t bring the will to do anything about it.  He tried to focus on the sound of his own breathing but the blood was still there, the blood was still on his hands and the tang of it kept bringing _it_ back, but he wasn’t going to think about that because he had to think about _other_ things, things that were more _important_ –

 _Your son wasn’t important_?

What was he supposed to do now?

He was _supposed_ to just keep moving on, like he always did.  It didn’t matter what he’d done or what the consequences were.  He was supposed to just forget about it and move on to the next plan, the next scheme, the next set of machinations.  This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.  He was supposed to be able to handle it. 

He had the awful feeling he was not handling it very well.  Or maybe he was.  Maybe this was what he was supposed to do.  What did a _normal_ father do when his son was killed?  What did he do when it was his own damn fault? 

It didn’t matter what he was _supposed_ to do.  There were things he _had_ to do, and as soon as possible.  He was wasting time just sitting here.  He needed to focus on improving Jonathan’s health enough that he could take him halfway across the country without killing him.

He didn’t feel as though he could ever move again.  He was going to have to figure it out, somehow, but it could all probably wait a little while.

It didn’t matter anyway.  Getting out of this city was supposed to have been a victory, a triumph.  Now it was only… desperation.  To get away from this place that had stolen so much of his life from him.

No.  Worse than that.  That he had _given_ so much of his life to.  Why had he done that?  He could have had it all, had anything he wanted, could have had it any place other than here.  And he had just… remained.  Let it all get worse and worse until there no longer was any hope of doing anything about it.

Why couldn’t he have realised any of this when it could have mattered?  Now he had to start his life over again, but he was too old and too tired and had done too much.  He couldn’t do it anymore. 

He _had_ to do it.  He had no choice.  

How long had he been sitting here?  Too long, probably hours.  He had no sense of time whatsoever just then, but it sounded like the sort of thing he would do.  Waste time on something inconsequential when there were bigger priorities to be addressed.  And he still had to tell Ada – 

“Eddie?”

Her voice was soft.  Maybe she was here to ask him for a progress report, but he didn’t care.  He didn’t care about anything.  He barely cared right now about the man he’d lost his son to rescue.  Because he should _not_ have lost him.  He should have done better.  He should not have brought him in the first place.  He had asked his son to help him rescue a man he did not know for Edward’s gain.  Stupid.  Careless.  Selfish.   _Selfish._

“Eddie, I’m not here to ask for anything.  We brought him back for you.”

He opened his eyes, confused.  She had?  Why had she –   

... we?

Edward looked up.  The perpetually overcast sky gave him the barest hint at the time, but it seemed to be late afternoon.  She… she must have taken action immediately after receiving his text. 

That was… nice of her.

The fact he barely recognised the man Selina had brought helped to focus his mind a little.  And he didn’t recall him because... he had only seen him once.  During the interview.  It was... his voice impersonator.  The man who took and made the calls Edward was able to delegate.  He remembered now.  “Richard,” he said, nodding up at him. 

“Mr Nygma,” Richard said politely. 

“He’s helped me a couple of times before and was willing to do me a favour,” Selina said, before an uncomfortable silence could form.  “But I think we can take care of the rest, honey.”

Richard nodded and turned to go, but not before giving him that look he had when Edward had first met him.  It was... strange.  As though he knew him from somewhere that Richard knew about and Edward didn’t.  It was nearly as unnerving as the fact that the initial telephone scripts he had sent for Edward’s approval contained almost _exactly_ what Edward himself would have said...

“Thank you,” he said shortly, looking away.  This was precisely the reason he had never been face-to-face with this man again.  But the trouble now that he had left was that Edward had to face what he had brought, and he would almost have preferred to have interviewed him all over again.

But he was going to have to do it.  Selina had gone to the trouble of retrieving him.  Even though Edward should have been the one to bring him back here.  But he couldn’t even do _that_ right.

He looked over to where she was standing, and… and it _was_ him.  She really _had_ brought him back.

He moved to lean over the… over his body, bracing himself on one knee, and every breath he took then trembled enough that he had to bite his tongue again.  He put his hand gently alongside what was left of the shattered face.  Seeing this hurt more than he could ever have imagined, and yet he was quite nearly relieved that he could at least… bury him, instead of leaving him for the GCPD to dispose of.  It didn’t make him feel any better about what he’d done.  But maybe it would.  Eventually.

He looked up at Selina, who was watching with silent disquiet.  “Thank you,” he told her, hushed.  For once it wasn’t hard to say.  She put a hand on his shoulder and said,

“Do you want me to stay?”

He frowned.  Why would she offer to do that over someone she didn’t even know?

“Why?”

 “I want to,” Selina said. 

He was incapable of doing anything other than staring for a minute.

“… you do?”

“I’m not _heartless_.”

_Dad, are you coming back soon?_

He looked behind him, startled to see Ada standing around the corner.  He had to get her out of here.  He couldn’t tell her right now.  Hopefully she wouldn’t notice what they were looking at –

“She doesn’t know,” he told Selina, without knowing quite why.  What did he expect _her_ to do about it?  And it was probably past the point of mattering, given all the things they’d seen each other do over the years, but how was he to know if she could understand the position he was in?

“Will she understand if I speak to her?” Selina interrupted, looking at Ada as well. 

“Yes.”

“Does she like flowers?”

“She loves them.  But – “

Selina walked close enough to kneel down in front of Ada and looked right into her face, which Edward had to say was surprising.  She was treating Ada just as she would a regular little girl, and he felt maybe she really did understand, a little. 

“Sweetie,” Selina was saying, “I need you to go do something for me.”

Ada tilted her head.  _Okay!_

“I need you to go find some flowers.  The prettiest ones you can find.  Take as long as you want and bring them back when you’ve found them.”

 _Oh boy!_   Ada jumped up and ran over to him.  _I’m gonna go do that, Dad!_

“Ada –“  But she wasn’t listening.  She had already run off.  He turned to Selina, his hands clenched.

“You can’t just send her away like that!  Especially considering – “

“She’ll be fine,” Selina said soothingly.  “Let’s take care of this before she gets back.”

He bit his tongue at the implication the burial of his son was something that needed to be ‘taken care of’.  He couldn’t snap at Selina now.  She owed him nothing.  She was doing him several favours right now.  And none of this was her fault.  All of it was his.  He’d done this.

And here he was again, where he’d been just the day before, doing just the _thing_ he had done the day before.  He hadn’t learned.  He hadn’t learned a thing.

His hands stung against the handle of the shovel.  He welcomed it.  He needed to be distracted from the thought of _why_ he needed to dig another hole here, and who he was putting in it.  And why.  He was burying his son because he had been selfish.  Edward should have been the one to take those bullets.  It should have been him on the ground.  It should have been him destined for this hole.  And he would have been, if he had done what a good father would have done and left his son at home.

He couldn’t think about that right now.

He did the job mechanically, and Selina just stood and watched silently.  She barely even moved.  When he stepped back she looked at him but said nothing.  He looked into the darkness that seemed to consciously reject the barest hints of sun peering through the cloud cover above. 

He didn’t want to put his son in there.

He didn’t even want to go back inside and get him.  He had been hoping all this time that he’d made a mistake, and that he would come out here and ask what he was digging this hole for, and he would hug him and tell him he was glad he was all right.  Because he was, wasn’t he?  He was fine.  Edward was remembering it all wrong.  His son was fine.  He’d just been faking so he could get out of that situation back at the GCPD more easily.  Selina was in on it, Richard was, hell _Ada_ probably knew too.  It was just a charade.  They were pulling one over on him.  It was fine.  Everything was fine.  He was going to go back in there, and his son would be sitting on the floor waiting for him, and as soon as Jonathan was a little better they would all go up to Canada together and –

“Eddie?”

How stupid.  How utterly stupid he was.  His memory was never wrong.  He was dead.  Shot in the head six times with a gun meant to kill Edward.  Alan had given up everything for him.  He shouldn’t have.  But of course that was what he had done.  _Chosen_ to do, for some unfathomable reason Edward had never and would never be able to deduce.

He just nodded.  He didn’t know what to do.  And he couldn’t tell her what was running through his mind just then.  She’d make fun of him.  And he was too tired to explain it even if he’d known how.

She put a hand on his shoulder, which was a good thing because he was beginning to feel disoriented.  He almost didn’t really know where he was, for some reason.  He knew _where_ objectively, but he also _wasn’t_ there at the same time.  As though he were wandering the space between planes.  An empty space.  It was cold and dark and empty.  He had put the shovel down, or maybe he had dropped it.  He couldn’t remember.  All he could remember was the sound of

He couldn’t really feel his son when they picked him up, either.  He knew he was heavy, and cold, and speckled with residue, but he couldn’t feel any of that.  He was behind himself.  He thought he should have been upset by that, or at least alarmed, but he didn’t want to be.  His boy had never been cold a day in his life. 

That was it, though, wasn’t it.  He didn’t have a life anymore.  Edward’s negligence had stolen it from him.  Selfish.

He knelt next to the hole and lowered his son into it, with Selina’s help; the closer he got to letting go, the more he didn’t want to.  He didn’t belong down there.  He should have been off picking flowers with Ada.  Or getting mad at her.  Or something.  Anything.  Edward wouldn’t have cared if the thing he’d been doing was yelling at Edward, vowing to walk away forever and never come back.  At least he would have been alive.  Even if he’d never seen him again, he would have been alive.

He couldn’t stand up.  He had his hand on his son’s arm and he didn’t want to let go of it.  If he let go of it he really _would_ be down there.  He really _would_ be burying him, and he really _would_ have to cover him up with dirt and walk away and leave him there forever.  He couldn’t do it.  He was just going to stay like this forever.  That was the plan, now.  Nothing else mattered anymore.  He didn’t care.  He didn’t care about anything.

Selina was kneeling down beside him.  She’d put his hand on his shoulder again, but he couldn’t really feel that either.  His chest ached.  He wanted to climb into the hole and hold his son and just stay like that for the rest of his life, but what good would that do?  He was dead.  There was no point in holding a dead body.  He should have done it more when he was alive, like a _good_ father would have done.

“It’s okay,” Selina said.  Her voice hurt his ears.

“I always… thought people who said such things were foolish,” he found himself saying.  He sounded… weak.  He pressed one clenched hand against the ground in front of him and focused on fixing that.  “But Lina… I would do anything **.** ”In that moment he could not think of a single thing he would not have traded away to have the chance to take all of this back.

“Eddie, you can’t do that,” Selina said, her hold on his shoulder tightening.  “You can’t keep this bottled up.  You _have_ to do this.”

He shook his head. 

 “Eddie…”

He didn’t even realise she’d done it until her hand was pressed against his back, but she had.  She’d leaned forward and pressed his face into her shoulder, and he didn’t feel a thing.  He couldn’t say he really wanted to.  Some distant feed of information in the back of his mind told him her nails were digging into his shirt, so he could surmise she was gripping him rather hard.  He couldn’t even move.  All he could do was stare into the dim blur that was Selina’s shoulder, because his son was dead and he had killed him.

“It’s going to be all right,” Selina murmured into his ear, but she was wrong, of course.  It wasn’t.  It was never going to be all right again.  He’d finally done it.  He’d finally destroyed his son.

“You know I deserve it, Selina.”

“No one deserves this.  Not even you.”

He did, though.  Of course he did.  How could he have possibly ever thought he could have his cake and eat it too?

When she finally decided to let him go he did not feel any better.  He almost felt worse, because he shouldn’t have agreed to let her stay in the first place.  This had nothing to do with her.  She should never have seen him like this.  And his son hadn’t liked her.  He’d just let a stranger that his son had expressed clear disapproval of to bury him, an act that should have been undertaken only by Edward himself.  This day was a steadily mounting example of the abject failure Edward was capable of.

“Do you want me to finish?” Selina asked.  It took him a moment to realise she’d said anything, and another to play it back in his mind so as to know what it had been.

“No!” he snapped.  He stood, snatching up the shovel as he did so.  She shouldn’t even be here.  He should have just done all of this himself.  He tried not to look at what he was doing.  Tried not to think about the fact that his son was down there, buried in dirt. 

When he was finished he just stood there and stared at the mound.  He felt very heavy.  As though he’d filled _himself_ with dirt.  He felt as though he were down there, somewhere, and he wasn’t coming back.  He didn’t really want to come back.  He was just going to stay there.  That would be nice.

“Do you want to say something?” Selina asked.  He could only muster up a blank look to direct at her.  Say something?  Say _what_?  What _was_ there to say?  Why was she even still _here_?  Shouldn’t she be angry he’d yelled at her for asking a well-intentioned question?

“People usually do that at funerals,” she went on.  “Just… some words about the person who’s gone.”

There was not a single word Edward could say now that he should not already have said.  It was stupid.  It was pointless.  He wasn’t going to do it.

“It’s not for him to hear.  It’s for you.  It’s your goodbye.”

Well, she seemed to know what she was doing.  He had no idea.  He barely even knew where he was just then.  He kept getting the impression he was still kneeling on the ground outside of the police station.  He could almost hear the sirens.  Smell the wet blood on his hands.  But that was over.  That had already happened.  This was now, and he could not keep standing here. 

If he had known then what he knew now, and there had been nothing he could do, what would he have said?

“I’m so proud of you, son.”

_What are you doing?_

Hearing her was like a temporary splash of cold water.  It brought him back to himself, but only for a moment.  He didn’t even look at her.  He had nothing to say to her.  He should just send her along with Selina, wherever _she_ was going.  Selina had been a better parent in two sentences than he’d been all Ada’s life.

“We’re just finishing a project, honey,” Selina said.  “Those are some lovely flowers you found.”

 _They’re the best ones I could find!  Like you asked for!_   She walked around in front of him, and he would have snapped at her for where she was standing if he could have found the energy.  _Dad?_

“Your daddy’s tired,” Selina told her.  “He needs to rest for a while.”

Forever, maybe.

“Can you put the flowers down right there?  It will be the perfect way to finish our project.”

She did so and then looked up at him again.  He couldn’t even return her gaze.  He had nothing left.  He had been completely hollowed out, except for some dull lightning ache that came and went without warning and without pattern.  He felt a little sick.  He was just never going to move again.  He couldn’t face what he had to do next.  Not just all of the things he had to take care of, but the fact that he was leaving his son here.  Running off to another country to live the better life he should have abandoned this city for the second Nikola had been turned on.  He didn’t even _want_ it anymore.  He wanted to give it to his son, who had known nothing other than the dingy leftovers of a broken city and a broken man who had insultingly accepted the title of his father.

“Eddie,” Selina said.  “Let’s go inside, okay?”

He tried to nod, or shrug, or do anything, really.  He didn’t.  Not until she put her arm around his waist and gently directed him back inside.  She led him to sit down against the wall and he just stayed there, like that, exactly as she’d put him.  He was just going to sit here like this.  He wasn’t moving.  He was never going to move.

She was kneeling in front of him, and she put one hand along one side of his face.  It was warm and soft.  His eyes brought her into focus.  “Try to sleep a little,” she said.  “I’ll stay with Ada until you wake up.  I promise.”

Her thumb was underneath his eye.  She probably still wanted him to cry, but he wasn’t going to.  Two people had ever seen and two people it would always be.  Everything was coming in and out.  He didn’t remember where he was, or how he’d gotten there.  Maybe he was dead.  He hoped he was dead.  If he was dead, his son had lived.

“Lie down,” she told him, and he did.  She didn’t need to put the pillow under his head, but she didn’t know he couldn’t feel his face against the floor.  It wasn’t there, or maybe he wasn’t.  Something wasn’t there.  His son wasn’t there.

“You’ll be all right,” Selina said.  “It’s the first day.  It’s going to hurt.  It’s going to hurt for a little while.  You can make it.”

He didn’t have the energy to tell her she was wrong.

 

 

**Author’s note**

**Richard is exactly who you think he is.  Yes, Alan is really really dead and he’s not coming back.  If I wrote how to use a manual wrong, I did ask the male bartender about it (he drives a manual Honda Civic) but it was all very confusing.**


	6. Part the Sixth

Part the Sixth

 

 

He opened his eyes because his head hurt.  It hurt so badly he thought someone had kicked him in the face.  No one had kicked him the face.  The only people there were Ada and Selina.  They were sitting on the floor, doing who knew what.  He didn’t care anyway.  He wasn’t getting up. 

Maybe he was, though.  The floor was pressing harshly against his side.  It was cold.  Where was the heating element?  And his head.  He could barely see, and that was as an aside to his missing glasses.  Maybe he’d get up for a minute.

He sat up, thought it was hard to; his arms were sore and he had no idea why.  He was tired, even though he’d just been sleeping. 

 _Dad!_ Ada exclaimed, jumping up from her place on the floor and running over to him.  _You’re not feeling good, huh?_

“I…”  He had the feeling he should have known the answer to that but did not.

 _I got you some flowers too!  To help._   She handed them to him and he took them bemusedly.  Who else had she gotten flowers for?  Selina? 

Why was Selina here?  She must have been after her papers.  Well, he didn’t have them.  She would just have to wait.  “Where’s your brother?”

She stopped bouncing up and down in front of him.  _Selina said he was going away for a while._

“She did?”  Why in the hell would –

It was the worst punch in the gut he’d ever felt.  He bit his tongue until he tasted blood, looking away from Ada.  Unfortunately, that meant he was facing the direction of his son’s grave.  _That’s_ where he was.  Somewhere and nowhere both.

_Yeah.  She said Alan was going away for a while and he’d come home later.  You know about that, right?_

“Of course I do.”  He didn’t sound very convincing, but she wouldn’t notice.  “He’ll come home later.”

Selina came over and crouched in front of him.  “I have to get going,” she said softly.  “I have things of my own to take care of.  Eddie…”

He shook his head.  “I’m fine.”

She laughed and that, of all things, made him feel a little better.  “You sure are.  Listen.  Look me up when you get to Canada, all right?  We have a lot of catching up to do, now that you’ve come back to what’s left of your senses.”

His inability to understand a word she said was baffling.  “We do?” 

“We do.”  She brought her arms across her knees.  “Go out and live your life, Eddie.  The time for this is over.  Don’t go back to it.  Leave before it sucks you back in.  I never want to see the name Riddler in the news again.”

He barely remembered who the Riddler even was right now.  He nodded, and she leaned forward and pulled him into a hug.  It felt as though she were trying to shield him from everything that had happened, from everything that had to happen still.  She couldn’t, of course, nor should she have.  She smelled of leather and a perfume he could have placed if his brain had not slipped a few gears.  He wanted her to let go.  He needed her to leave so he could deal with all of this.  But she thought she was helping, and for the sake of the favours she’d done him he didn’t move until she let go.

 _I want a hug too!_ Ada announced, and she ran over and captured Selina before she could stand.  Selina laughed and indulged her.  When Ada sat down next to Edward, Selina smiled at her. 

“She’s a sweetheart,” she told him, and he somehow smiled a little bit.  They could agree on that, at least.

“She is,” he said quietly, and Selina stood up.

“Take care of yourself.”  She waved in Jonathan’s general direction.  “And this guy.  Make sure he knows what you did for him.”

He looked up at her.  He felt a little more awake now.  “Thank you.”

“Don’t forget about my papers.”

“I won’t.”  He’d take care of it as soon as he felt able to get up.  In an hour or so, maybe.

_Are you gonna feel better soon, Dad?_

No.  He was going to have to at least halfway fake it, though.  “I’m very tired, princess.”

 _I like Selina_ , Ada declared, bouncing her leg a little.  _Can she come over again?_

“Sure.”

_It was too bad I couldn’t talk to her though.  Well I could, but she didn’t understand anything.  But she was really nice even though -_

“You know I love you, don’t you, Ada?” he felt the need to say suddenly.  “You know that, right?”

Ada stopped moving.  _Yeah.  I know.  Dad?_

“Yes, angel.”

_You’re really just tired, huh?_

It wasn’t even a lie.  “I’ve never been more tired in my life.”

 _You can sleep if you want to._   She patted the side of his face.  _Like this guy.  He just sleeps.  He doesn’t look too good, I gotta say._

Edward almost laughed.  She was so normal in such a ridiculous situation.  It helped anchor him, in a pathetic sort of way.  He looked at Jonathan.  He was a few feet away and the blanket was down around his waist, the heating element nearby.  He certainly did not look good.

“He’s fallen a little ill,” Edward told her.  “We’re going to help him.”

 _Will hugs help?_ Ada asked.  _I’m good at those._

“They might,” he answered, wondering just how Jonathan would react to such a thing.  Ada climbed into his lap and wrapped her arms around his chest.  As always she squeezed a little too tight, but he welcomed that.  It was something tangible to focus on. 

 _And_ you _know_ I _love_ you _of course, right Dad?_

“Yes.”  He didn’t deserve her, either, but he didn’t have much else to give him hope right now.  Jonathan might not even make it.  He didn’t know how sick Jonathan was, or with what.  Jonathan would probably die on the trip to the office tower, long before Edward ever got him out of the city.  Now that he was thinking about it, he should probably begin that process by ensuring the space was conducive to Jonathan’s improvement.  And he would.  In a little while.  Just then so much as returning Ada’s hug was beyond him.

Once he dredged up the ability, he spent most of his time making the trip across town to the space that had been located at his request, moving supplies up there and cleaning it up as best he could without anything to really do it with.  It was a serviceable space located upon the upper floors of an office tower within easy sight of the bridge to the mainland, though large portions of the walls had been seemingly abandoned or knocked out at some point.  That made it a very cold place to be, given the elevation and the wind, but Edward did not mind so much.  It meant he was always very cold or very numb, and both of those things were welcome.  When he was not doing that, some great measure of fatigue would overcome him, but the sleep that should have followed did not.  He would merely stare up at the dark ceiling of the toy store and listen to Jonathan’s laboured breathing.  He needed to get Jonathan medicine.  He himself needed to eat and shave and clean up.  He hadn’t done any of that in a few days.  He needed a sense of time to keep track of it all, and his had warped entirely.  If he could just get some sleep he would feel better.

 _Dad_! Ada said, running up to him, though he didn’t look at her until she was directly in his line of sight.  _Look what came!_

She handed him a file folder, though it took him a moment to register its existence.  He opened it slowly.  Jonathan’s papers.

 _What is it?_ Ada asked.  He looked at the inside of the passport idly.  God, that picture was terrible.  Jonathan did _not_ photograph well.

“Just some things I need for later.”  He closed the folder and gave it back to her.  “Put that in my suitcase.  Please.”

 _Sure_ , Ada said, and she ran off to presumably do just that.  He realised dully that his hands were streaked with grease and he had probably gotten it on the folder.  He had the feeling that should have mattered to him.  It didn’t.

When Ada came back she sat herself down next to him and wrapped herself around his waist.  She’d been doing that a lot.  She’d also been asking repeatedly why he was sad, but he just kept telling her he was tired.  It wasn’t a lie.  He _was_ tired.  He slept only about an hour at a time, when he drifted asleep by mistake, and it was never restful because he kept having bizarre dreams about being trapped in places that didn’t exist.  He needed to sleep, and he needed to get up and find something to eat, somehow, because he was beginning to feel extremely ill and a terrible pain was developing in his gut.  He pressed his head back against the wall and tried to dredge up some semblance of motivation.  Ada needed him to snap out of this.  Not to mention Jonathan.  The room he’d been working on was just about ready.  He just had to pick up Jonathan and put him back in the seat and - 

 _Dad_?

“Yes, angel.”

_That guy looks really bad.  I mean he did before but he looks really awful._

And if Jonathan died, all of this was for nothing.  His entire body protested but he stood up.  The sudden rush of dizziness made his nausea worse.  He had to fight to avoid pressing an arm to his stomach, which suddenly hurt even more, and he realised he’d been ignoring a migraine, somehow.  He closed his eyes to give himself a moment.  He was fine.  He just needed to keep going.

Ada jumped up, clapping.  _You’re gonna come help him?_

“Sure.”  He needed water.  Jonathan probably needed water.  Jonathan probably needed an entire hospital, but Edward wasn’t able to provide that right now.  “Do you know if I have any water, princess?”

 _You do!_ she said, nodding.  _You have this much._   And she held up four fingers.

That would have to do for now.

She brought him one of the bottles and once he’d drank some of it he did think he felt a little sharper.  All right.  Now he was going to make one last trip to the –

“Wait,” he said, his voice disused but still intelligible.  “How many bottles did you say there were, again?”

 _There’s four,_ Ada said.  He had to carefully slow his breathing.

It meant something.  But what?  What was he supposed to avoid?  What was he supposed to do to avert disaster?  Or was this all a product of that one bad decision he’d made, and he _couldn’t_ avoid it?  And he was just irreversibly destined to encounter even _more_ misfortune and this was a sign it was coming soon?

He was being stupid.  It was just a coincidence, that was all.  The strange reoccurrence of the number four was meaningless.  He was _giving_ it meaning.

 _It can’t be a coincidence.  Four cigarettes, cell block four, four officers_ , _four_ gunshots, _Edward, this_ cannot _be_ chance _!_

Of course it was chance.  That whole ridiculousness with the numbers meant nothing.  He wasn’t going to keep entertaining it.  It was foolish.

He took the rest of the water to Jonathan, and put his hand into his back pocket for a handkerchief.  He ran the moistened cloth over Jonathan’s face.  He was warmer than Edward had ever seen before, and yet shivered incessantly.  Edward pushed the blanket a little more firmly around him.

 _He’s cold_ and _hot_ , Ada said.  Edward nodded. 

“That happens sometimes.”  He stood up.  “We’re going to have to move him someplace else.  We might be found here.  If you’ve taken anything out of the suitcases, you need to put it back now, please.”

 _Okay_.  And she ran over to her house and stuck the majority of her upper half inside.  After a minute she called back, _Dad_?

“Mm.”  How did he turn this heating element off to transport it?

_You said I could have the cane now.  Where is it?_

Trying to remember stole his breath.

“Uh,” he said around the sudden constriction in his throat, “I… lost it.”

 _Oh_ , she said softly.  _I really wanted to use it!_

“Well, it’s gone!” he snapped, and while it brought him back to the present tasks at hand that did not make it right.

 _Okay, Dad._ And she sat down in front of the suitcases with a handful of items and started to carefully put them back inside.  Probably exactly as she’d found them, so he wouldn’t yell at her again.  He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes for a good minute or so.

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

When she was finished she knelt next to him and told him how the element had been put together.  It didn’t actually have a power switch, so he had to carefully disconnect one of the relevant wires instead.  He gave it to Ada to put with the suitcases. 

“We’re leaving,” he told her.  “You’re sure you got everything?”

 _I did!_ she announced, nodding, and he looked to Jonathan again.  The man was not particularly heavy, but Edward’s energy was barely existent.  Well, he’d take care of the suitcases first.

He did not pay very much attention to the remainder of this process, partially because he did not want to and partially because he did not have to.  Ada was talking and talking and he was not hearing a single word.  He had the feeling he should care about that, or perhaps do something about it, or both.  But he instead drove to the half-built office tower on the edge of the city with as little conscious effort as possible, and somehow he did this without causing any problems.  He still was not quite certain of how he had gotten the suitcases and Jonathan up there both, because try as he might the memory seemed lost to him.  He tried to care.  He couldn’t.

They were on the highest storey that had a floor installed, and though that seemed stable there was only about three-quarters of a wall, which meant that the wind came clear through the gaping steel from both the west and above.  He would have placed them on a floor farther down if they had not been more or less claimed already by persons he was too tired to attempt to remove.  He put Jonathan into the corner farthest from this inconvenience and sat back against the wall himself.  He’d barely gotten anything done and yet he was unfathomably exhausted.  He was passively aware of Ada fussing over Jonathan.  He should make the effort to tell her not to bother.  That Jonathan would never like her and would never accept her, and so her kindness to him would go ignored and perhaps even incur his anger.  But he did not care enough to do so.

Ada came over and practically flung herself onto the floor next to him; he barely even noticed when her arm collided with his, though that should have hurt quite a great deal.  She leaned into him and looked out in the direction of the sky beyond the unfinished wall.

 _It seems windy up here_ , she said.  _You’re gonna get cold._

He didn’t answer. 

 _I wish Alan would come up here_ , she went on after a minute.  _He would_ -

“Shut up,” Edward interrupted, pushing her aside with a sudden flare of ire-induced vigour.  “He’s gone, what about that don’t you understand?”  He stood up and crossed over to crouch next to Jonathan.  She had forgotten to provide him the heating element, the

_But he’s coming.  You said he was._

“Yes,” he said, subdued by the sobriety of her voice.  “Of course he is.”  He set the element down on the opposite side of Jonathan and watched until it glowed red.  The energy had fled as quickly as it had arrived, and now he leaned himself against this wall instead of returning to where he had been.  Ada joined him, though with more hesitance than before.

 _I’ll just be quiet_ , she said, indeed quite softly.  He couldn’t bring himself to put his arm around her, though he wanted to.

“All right,” was all he managed.

 

//

 

When he woke up he had to shake the confusion that came when he realised there was a towel on his face.  He grunted and pulled it off, putting his that hand over his eyes immediately because the _sun_ was glaring into them.  His other hand seemed to be busy, doing…

He sat up, snapping around to look and by God, yes!  Jonathan was _holding his hand!_   He turned to Ada, feeling better than he had in days.  “He woke up?”

Ada shook her head, putting aside the stack of towels she’d put in her lap for Edward to lie on.  His heart sank as she said, _I didn’t know how to make him feel better_.

“So you thought doing that would help.” 

She nodded.  _He’s your important friend, right?_

“He is.”  More than she had had cause to know.

 _You’re my important friend too!  And holding your hand makes me feel better!_   The tilt of her head was decidedly inquisitive, and he tried to smile at her.  He didn’t quite get there. 

“I thought I was your father,” he said, in an attempt to lighten things.  She slid herself over to his right side, where his free hand was, and attached herself to his waist.

 _Dads are the_ most _important friends._

Were they? he wondered.  Were they even supposed to be friends at all?  What was a father supposed to _be_ , anyway?  Hell if he knew.  Not him, that was for certain.  He had nothing to go off of, other than what _not_ to do, but knowing that didn’t lead into anything else at all.  At the very least, at the barest of minimums, he was supposed to have protected them.  Kept them safe, put his life ahead of theirs.  He hadn’t done that.  Wasn’t doing it, even now.  Ada was doing a better job of that without even thinking about it. 

He had to have done _something_ right, then, if she had turned out better than he?  She had to have _learned_ that from someplace.  She had no other role models, no access to popular media or indeed anyone else at all.  He must not be _that_ bad.  Maybe he was even…

No.  That was outrageous.

He put the free arm around her and closed his eyes.  He didn’t think he’d ever felt so _hopeless_.  What did they even do now?  Did he actually think he could take two wanted criminals across the border without being caught?  _And_ a…

His gut went cold as he instinctively pulled her closer.  He felt more awake than he had in days.  There was no way he could explain her to the border agents.  He was going to have to leave her here.  Alone.  He supposed he may as well finish the job, and he pressed his lips together as he looked down at Jonathan, brow creasing.  He had never hated having to _wait_ so much!  Wait for Jonathan to get better, wait for his contacts to come through, wait for the pieces to fall into place… he was so _tired_ of it all!  And what was he to do about all of this stress?  There were no walls to write on, nothing he could build, hell, he even would have gone back to the handwashing if he’d had anywhere to do it!  Everything was slipping away from him with torturous slowness.  His life as he’d known it was both literally and figuratively demolished.  To move on, he had to leave behind what little he had left.  His Ada was going to have to remain here until he could figure _some_ way of bringing her over, and he hated himself for it but what other choice did he have?  He couldn’t take them both; how was he to explain away a fake vacation where he had acquired a very advanced robot?  He barely had it in him to tell the truth right now, let alone construct an elaborate lie!  And Jonathan could _not_ be left.  Jonathan _had_ to leave the city, and he was not going to make it without help.  He was barely breathing.  He was going to have to take Jonathan and leave Ada, and the way this was going Jonathan was going to die before they ever made it and then he would have _nothing_ …

He couldn’t do this anymore.

He released her and brought his face to his knees, pressing his face into them as hard as he could.  He was shaking.  Hatred for himself clenched his chest.  This was what he had been reduced to.  A month ago the most powerful and feared man in Gotham, today a broken wreck dependant on the goodness of a child as his best friend’s every shuddering breath threatened to be his last.  He had never, ever felt _remotely_ so shattered in his entire worthless, pathetic life.  He might as well just give up and throw himself from the incomplete wall to his right, through which an inviting wind gently wound as though it were a sign he should go ahead.  Just give up, like he should have last year, the year before that, ten years ago.  Twenty.  Thirty.  Why had he ever tried at all?  He wouldn’t have bothered, if he’d known this was where he’d be end up when he started.  He should just give up.  Though jumping from the office tower was probably going too easy on himself.  He should at least make the effort to go into the city proper and let the Bat have him, or find some group of random citizens who were bolstered enough by the Bat’s actions to give it to him.  That was how he’d been born, wasn’t it, a result of anger and hate and fists clenched tight?  Might as well go out that way as well, broken and bleeding and forgotten.  He tried to tell himself he was being ridiculous but everything seemed a viable option just now.

 _Dad?_ asked Ada, who of course did not know that he didn’t deserve to be called that, didn’t deserve _anything_ , really, and when she put her hand on his shoulder he shook her off violently and said,

“Don’t touch me!”

He knew how she looked just then: curling into herself, confused, worried.  Scared, but not for herself.  Why was she so kind and gentle?  He didn’t understand.

_Why are you sad?_

Because he was a horrible, useless _failure_ after all, of course, wasn’t that obvious!? 

“I’m just tired, sweetheart.”

 _That’s not what you do when you’re tired_ , she said confusedly.

“It is now,” he responded shortly.

_You’re sad.  I want to help so you’re not anymore!_

Sad.  This wasn’t _sad._ This was dejected, depressed, demoralised; it was all and yet none of these things.  He was going to have to come up with an entire new word just to describe this. A new word that somehow encompassed sadness and self-denigration and disappointment and fear all at the same time.   

“You can’t.”

_Why?_

“I have bad news, princess.”

_Okay._

“You’re going to have to stay here by yourself for a little while.”

 _Oh,_ was all she said to that. His own words burned his ears and in his memory.  The only child he had left, abandoned so he could save himself.

Disgusting.

But if he stayed, they _all_ died.  Jonathan would not live if he stayed in Gotham; there was no place to go, no place to _hide_.  Edward would be killed eventually, whether stress bade him careless or he merely put a gun to his own head.  And then Ada would be alone anyway.  This way, at least two of them made it out, with a chance at figuring something out for her… He found that he had pressed his face into his knees again but he could not bring himself to move.

 _Don’t be sad!_ she said, hugging him again so tightly she was going to leave bruising he quite frankly deserved.  _You’re doing your best._

“I don’t want to leave you here,” Edward whispered, by mistake.  His head was beginning to pain him. 

 _It’s okay,_ she said, even though it was the least okay thing he’d ever done.  _You know what to do!_

But he _didn’t_ , that was the _point_!  He _didn’t_ know what to do, because what he was _going_ to do was unacceptable!  How could he do it, why was he even able to _consider_ it?  He was in effect _punishing_ her because he’d brought her into existence.  Exactly the same as his own father had done.

He wrapped his arms around her then, holding her urgently.  Her reciprocation was going to leave him with bruising he both deeply did and did not deserve. 

“I’m sorry, princess.”

_Will you be safe if you go there?_

“Yes.” 

_And you won’t be sad anymore?_

He pressed his hand into the back of her head, cradling it.  “I won’t be.”  Maybe.

_Why didn’t you go yet then!  Go right now!_

What a pure and innocent girl she was.  He didn’t deserve her anyway.  Hadn’t deserved any of them.

“I have to wait.  Jonathan is not well enough for me to leave just yet.”

 _Oh_ , she said in realisation.  _Well, as soon as he’s better, run as fast as you can, okay?_

“Okay.”

They sat in silence.   He had never wanted her to see him like this, nor hear him say anything like that.  He had above all since her creation wanted her to know how much he loved her, about how much she meant to him, and yet he was leaving her behind as though he’d never felt anything in the first place.  He did.  He always would.  And he hated having to choose between them, the two people he had left of all the handful that had ever cared about him.  She was the most deserving to be taken with him; all she’d ever done was what was best for him.  Jonathan had been cruel and spiteful and had always taken advantage of him.  But Edward could not leave him to die.  Edward was all that he had, and that said very little.  At least there was a chance he could retrieve Ada later.  If he left Jonathan, he would never see him again.  He had to choose between two terrible options.  Neither was agreeable and both made him hate himself for being trapped in the position of having to take one of them.

_I’m going to go now, okay?_

It was a question he wasn’t supposed to answer, for she let go of him and stood up.  He was left on his knees in front of her, confused, hands grasping empty air.  She wiggled her fingers and turned around.

“Where are you going?”  Panic soured his words.

She looked over her shoulder.  _I’m going home!  I’m going to go now so you can try extra hard to help Jonathan get better!_

He was biting the inside of his cheek so hard he could taste blood.  “You’re… you’re leaving?”

_Yes.  Help Jonathan get better fast so you can come get me, okay?_

“Ada...”  His chest felt as though it were going to burst out of shame.  Why was his _daughter_ protecting _him_?  _Why_ was he so damned _pathetic_ that _she_ –

 _I love you, Dad!  I’ll see you soon!_ she said, waving, and she _skipped_ out of sight.  He was abandoning her and she was still happy.  Still happy, still hopeful, still _innocent_ despite his utter, total lack of any value or skill at all.  She still loved him though there was not a person in the world who deserved that less.

He pressed his face to the floor, hands clasped almost unbreakably behind his head as the world seemed to crash down upon him with a sudden violence, and he started to scream.

 

//

 

He stayed there, facedown on the floor, for a long time.  He was dizzy enough from dehydration and hunger that sometimes he could pretend he was still lying on top of the smoking factory, his children still around somewhere trying to figure out how to revitalise him.  Then he would ask himself why his throat was so dry, and why there was a chunk missing out of the inside of his cheek, and he would remember all of the horrible things that had come after.  And then he would ask the universe to get it over with, and just end this mess.  He didn’t _care_ how.  Asphyxiation, fire, the building suddenly collapsing in on itself, all of them at the same time!  Some part of him scorned these thoughts, saying he was being overdramatic, but he kept running over it all in his head.  All of the things he’d lost.  All the effort it was going to take to rebuild his entire life.  How, even if he managed to somehow get through this, make it across the border, and become an entirely new man, he would still have every excruciating, wretched detail etched into his brain for it to bring up whenever it wanted.  Because _that_ was what he really needed, right, that was _really_ what he wanted to go through more often!  Just add _more_ horrible memories to the pile!  Why not?  He could take it, right?  He could just keep holding up all of that, just keep being buried and buried and buried underneath all of life itself, and he’d still come out ahead, wouldn’t he?  That’s what he’d told himself all these years, after all, surely if he _lied_ to himself often enough some _miracle_ would happen and everything would fall into place! 

Hate coiled in his chest.  Towards himself, of course, the only person who really deserved it.  He’d laid blame often enough, laid it on the Bat and his parents and every random citizen who had ever mocked his grandstanding – because that was what it had been, grandstanding by a worthless fool who never should have believed he could do better – but there was one constant in all of that, and the constant in this case was also the cause.  A thousand times he imagined himself, standing on the half-finished floor of the office tower, staring out over the glittering lights of the bridge and the heaving waters of the bay, watching all of the citizens going about their lives with his unfocused eyes.  He imagined stepping out and falling into a sweet oblivion he so badly craved now, for even his sleep would soon be fraught with every single mistake he’d ever made.  His body would shatter into unrecognisability and he would be forgotten.  And _he_ , finally, would be able to forget.

But he wouldn’t do that.  He was too much of a coward.  Too much of a –

And then his mind would go back to Ada, and he would remember no, it was not about cowardice this time.  It was about Jonathan.  Jonathan would die without him.  And he had promised to take Jonathan with him.  He had promised they’d go away when this was all over.  He had promised.

He had one final chance to make this right.  One final chance to do something properly, to truly _succeed_.  And, just as importantly, to do something for someone else, as he had failed to do for his own children.  Jonathan’s life depended on what he did with his.  He couldn’t give up now.  It couldn’t be _about_ him, not anymore.  It had to be about Jonathan. 

He sat up slowly.  His face felt swollen and everything hurt.  He squinted into the dark for his glasses and when he’d put them on he moved across the floor to Jonathan.  He was shivering with deep violence, skin pale enough that it seemed to glow, pulse a-flutter and face set against some terrible nightmare.  He took one of the frigid hands and sat dully, listening to Jonathan breathe.  Every gasping breath was a measure of the sheer willpower the man had to stay alive when he so clearly should have died years ago.  Edward admired that about him. He always would. 

But he looked at Jonathan now and _saw_ him, really _saw_ him for the first time, and... he understood. 

The things Jonathan had done, had been prevented from doing, they were nothing short of unapologetic evil.  And here Jonathan lay dying.  He was dying, and this time… this time, Edward didn’t have to save him.

_He’s been manipulating you ever since you were twenty-five.  You know he doesn’t love you.  You know he never did._

_He thinks he does_.  And really, what was the difference?

 _He needs you.  You don’t need him.  You both know that.  Take Ada, arrange to meet Selina across the border, and leave him.  He deserves it.  You don’t have to kill him.  Just leave.  How much longer could he possibly have even if you_ do _save him?_

_If I do that, then my son... it will all have been for nothing._

_He would understand._

He rubbed his forehead.  _No._ He would be so disappointed.

And Edward couldn’t live with that. 

Just as he knew he was never going to see Jonathan this way again, he would never understand this line of thought again.  He had forged his path.  For better or for worse, he had to continue along it.

_Jonathan will never understand what you lost for his sake._

_I can’t go without both of them._ He was going to have to make do with what he had left.

_He deserves nothing._

He shook his head softly.

_He’s getting exactly what he deserves, and so am I._

Enough of that.  Enough of all of that.  It wasn’t the time.  Back to fundamentals.  Let his mind automatically assess the situation and tell him how to solve it.  The problem… he needed to get out of here.  No.  That was a different problem.  A future issue.  The _current_ problem was that Jonathan was too ill to travel.  And if Edward did not do something about it, _he_ would soon be too.  The solution was… blankets.  Medicine.  Some source of heat, clean water, and he needed to eat before he fainted.  Right now he didn’t know quite what to attribute this light-headedness to, but that was undoubtedly a large part of it.  He leaned over and pressed his lips to the flushed forehead of his friend – his partner – and whispered, “I’ll be back.”

When he went to get up, Jonathan’s hand tightened the barest bit.  Edward looked at him sharply, the first bit of hope he’d felt in a long time lightening his chest.  “Jonathan?”

There was no other response.  But there had been one.  There _had_ been. 

Maybe he _could_ do this.  Maybe he could make it after all.  If _he_ couldn’t do it, who else could? 

Instead of yet another unfortunate catastrophe stacked atop the precarious pile already accumulated throughout his life, he needed to look at this as the greatest challenge he’d ever faced.  That _anyone_ had ever faced.  He was the only one with the skill, the mental mettle to do so.  Who else could illegally move two supercriminals from one country to another successfully, one of which was on the brink of death?  No one _he_ knew.  No one else even came close.

That needed to be his focus.  He felt the tug of his self-pity still – a consequence of his cursed eidetic brain bringing up, unbidden, many things he didn’t want to remember – but he had to fight it as he never had before.  Jonathan, he had to think of Jonathan.  And the future beyond that, for once he’d succeeded with Jonathan he could turn his attention to Ada.  God, he already missed her.  He swallowed against the temptation to let it pull him back down.  He would see her again.  He would bring her with him.  One step at a time.  That was the long game, and the short was of direst urgency just then.

Jonathan’s hand tightened again, and when Edward looked at him, those luminous eyes were desolate and unfocused.  Edward leaned forward again.

“Eddie?”  He more read his lips than actually heard him speak.

“What.”

 “You came for me,” Jonathan whispered.

_I wish I hadn’t._

“Of course,” Edward told him quietly, clenching his free hand in his lap to distract him from that line of thought.  He’d done that.  It was over.  It was no good to him.  He’d made his decisions, and now he had things to do.  “Go to sleep.”

When Jonathan’s hand loosened, Edward gently placed it on his chest and stood, wincing.  The pain was incredible.  He worked ease back into his body as he walked to the edge of the floor, and looked out over the shimmering city below.  It beckoned.  It held a promise.  It held a lie.

He turned and headed down the stairs.

 

**Author’s note**

**Now, you may be thinking, ‘Indy, why did you make me read all that?  The whole thing is sad and there’s no payoff and it’s just plain depressing.’  Well, there’s a few reasons why.**

**First off, if Edward had no reason to break his cycle, he wouldn’t.  He believes he would.  But he would never, ever stop playing the game without a giant crack occurring in his worldview.  The crack is the loss of Alan.  He is finally forced to realise that he cannot keep going like that without devastating consequences, and unfortunately he had to lose what mattered most to him to understand that.  Even if Alan had just up and left he would not have made any changes.  He had to face consequences for his actions for him to learn, because he had never really had to face them before.**

**Sssssecondly, something I really love about Riddler in general and Arkhamverse Riddler in particular is he just gets back up.  No matter what happens, he gets back up.  He gets pulverised, he gets cancer, he discovers the people he thought were his friends used him and would have been willing to let him die… doesn’t matter.  He gets back up.  This is him faced with the worst events of his life and getting back up.  It hurts more than anything ever has and, quite frankly, he’d rather drop dead, but he’s going to get back up.  You guys might not like that ending, but I do.**

**As for Ada getting stuck on the US side of the border, he really can’t bring her over.  He’d have to declare her as being bought in the US, and her value, and the border patrol would probably want to know where he got such a thing, and that would blow the entire story and they wouldn’t make it over.  And he is in no state to make up elaborate stories or even really to bring his charisma to bear.  So yes, Ada has to stay behind.**

**The number four doesn’t actually have any predictive power and it doesn’t indicate anything, it’s just confirmation bias mixing with his OCD making him believe that, because he tried to ignore his rituals, bad things are happening.**


End file.
